Employee Free Choice Act

The bill would have removed the present right of the employer to demand an additional, separate ballot when more than half of employees have already given their signature supporting the union.

[3] Moreover, even if every employee has signed cards indicating their preference to be represented by the union, an employer may demand a secret ballot, and refuse to bargain until one is held.

[3] The effect of section 2 would have been that if a majority of employees at a workplace have already put their names on cards, there would have been no further requirement to confirm the union can represent them through an additional ballot.

It would have meant that an employer could not demand a further secret ballot after a majority of employees had already put their names on cards supporting union representation.

If the FMCS is unable to bring the parties to agreement after providing mediation services for 30 days the dispute will be referred to arbitration.

A study by John-Paul Ferguson and Thomas Kochan at the MIT Sloan School of Management found that only 56% of unions that win an election ever negotiate their first contract.

[9] The AFL–CIO says in a pro-EFCA paper, citing data by Ferguson and Kochan, that this is because "newly formed unions lose their presumption of majority status after one year without reaching a contract.

The AFL–CIO asserts that this gives employers the incentive to delay the bargaining process for a year and force the demoralized workers to vote again, often resulting in the union's decertification.

"[10] They claim that "the Employee Free Choice Act eliminates the incentive for employers to bargain in bad faith" and it "will dramatically reduce the delay, frustration and animosity associated with the current company-dominated system."

Section 4(a) of the Bill would have made the National Labor Relations Board seek injunctions against employers who discriminate against employees who attempt to organize a union.

Specifically, the bill allows for an injunction whenever an allegation is proven that an employer threatened to or did discharge or discriminate against an employee who sought representation by a union.

In the 111th United States Congress, as of July 9, 2009, the Senate version of the EFCA, S.560, had 40 cosponsors in addition to its sponsor (Edward M. Kennedy, D, MA).

[24] On July 16, 2009, reports were made that Senate advocates proposed dropping the provisions removing the employer's right to demand an extra ballot.

"[27] EFCA proponents state that under current law the union ballots are "secret in name only" by citing experts such as University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, who in testimony before the U.S. Congress stated: In the American democratic tradition the principle of the secret ballot is not simply the fact that you go into a voting booth and pull a curtain and nobody sees what you do.

Any employer intent on resisting workers' self-organization can drag out legal proceedings for years, fearing little more than an order to post a written notice in the workplace promising not to repeat unlawful conduct.

An original co-sponsor of the Employee Free Choice Act, Obama urged his Senate colleagues to pass the bill during a 2007 motion to proceed: I support this bill because in order to restore a sense of shared prosperity and security, we need to help working Americans exercise their right to organize under a fair and free process and bargain for their fair share of the wealth our country creates.

They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions.

"[36] To find out how effective the current NLRB system actually is—in other words, how well it reflects workers' wishes to organize into unions and bargain contracts with management—MIT Sloan School of Management professor Thomas A. Kochan and MIT Ph.D. student John Paul Ferguson used federal data to track the progress of more than 22,000 union organizing drives between 1999 and 2005.

They found that "only one in five cases that filed an [NLRB] election petition ultimately reached a first contract [between workers and management]," which they reported in a The Boston Globe article.

[38] Critics contend that additional use of card check elections will lead to overt coercion on the part of union organizers.

I cannot fathom how we were about to sit there today and debate a proposal to take away a worker's democratic right to vote in a secret-ballot election and call it 'Employee Free Choice.

'[40]The bill's opponents also oppose the mandatory arbitration of disputes involving the terms of a first contract, asserting that such a procedure could constitute an improper intrusion of government into private business affairs and harmful for competitiveness and innovation.

[42] Opponents also point to a 2001 letter to Mexican government officials, signed by 11 Democrats who subsequently voted in favor of HR 800, encouraging the "use of secret ballots in all union recognition elections" that take place in Mexico.

The letter further states, "we feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose," seeming to contradict the spirit of the legislation passed by the House.

800, for the first time in labor law's history, imposes a one-size-fits-all scheme of mandatory, binding interest arbitration with respect to initial contracts, on bargaining parties, again stripping American workers of the right to vote on the terms and conditions of their employment.

"[29] The minority (Republican) views of the committee also quoted multiple federal and Supreme Court decisions: A secret ballot election is the most satisfactory—indeed the preferred—method of ascertaining whether a union has majority support.

[I]t is beyond dispute that secret election is a more accurate reflection of the employees' true desires than a check of authorization cards collected at the behest of a union organizer.

1983)).In 2007, 28 Republican Senators supported an opposition bill, the Secret Ballot Protection Act,[44] which would eliminate the use of the card check procedure.

[48]University of Chicago legal professor Richard Epstein also wrote a The Wall Street Journal editorial opposing the act, saying that it is unconstitutional due to restrictions on free speech.

Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino owner and real-estate developer, stated: "Radical Islam and Employee Free Choice are the 'two fundamental threats to society.