Anti-EFCA Forces Launch “News” Site On Employee FORCED Choice Act
Okay, this one is really going to infuriate organized labor.
The forces massed against the Employee Free Choice Act have just launched a new “news” site that’s totally devoted to making the case against the measure, with a particular emphasis on the damage it would allegedly do the economy. The site calls the measure the “Employee FORCED Choice Act.”
You can see the new homepage by clicking right here; note the similarities to Drudge. The url will be blasted out later today to hundreds of thousands on the email list of the anti-EFCA group Workforce Fairness Institute, which created the site.
“It’s a one stop shop for information on how the employee forced choice act would destroy small businesses and create massive job loss,” says Danny Diaz, a spokesperson for Workforce Fairness.
it’s no accident that the new site is being released on the day that new job losses were announced. Foes of the measure will keep aggressively pushing the line that EFCA would further damage the economy, because they hope wavering moderate Senators will grab this rationale as the cover they need to vote against the measure.
The new site represents something of a strategic shift for the anti-EFCA forces. While they’d mostly attacked the provision of the legislation that would allow workers to join a union without a secret ballot, they’re now going after the component forcing quick government arbitration when worker-employer talks break down. “We’re gonna ratchet up the conversation on this,” Diaz says.
The game here is that EFCA opponents want to force labor to defend the secret ballot and binding arbitration provisions at a time when labor officials want to keep the argument focused on the plight of workers, because when the battle is fought on that rhetorical turf, labor has the upper hand.
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The pushback strategy should be simple. All the union guys need to do is launch a mirror site with stories of the instances where unions negotiated down in order to save jobs while other times they negotiated up during good times. Hell they should reach out to the newly minted NFL labor union leader also since they are the most effective in sports or so it seems. They should also consider having a page solely devoted to publishing the many complaints leveled against different employers that tried to stop unionization through intimidation and or firings made to the NLB. To be honest I haven’t been all that impressed with how the union is handling this from the get go. I didn’t think this was the right time to try to get the bill passed. I don’t think they understand how strongly they needed to pushback on the secret ballot canard and now I don’t think they recognize that people are a lot more sympathetic to the little guy than the business owner big wigs and how much power they have to shape the conversation. Its like they are allowing the anti EFCA folks to shape the conversation and then they just respond. They need to be a helluva lot more PROactive in order to get the legislation passed. Just saying you will back any Congressperson who votes for it isn’t enough and wasn’t really a smart move anyway.
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To date I have yet to see a union person get on TV and advocate some of the hidden reasons why people unionize other than the one ad about work place safety. Thats simply not enough. You can make webads for damn near free and get plenty of attention through press releases. Why they don’t have YouTube filled up with ads right now I will never know.
Yeah, agreed, it’s remarkable I have to say, I don’t get the sense that labor’s communications strategy is as thought through as the opposition’s is.
Greg
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You see Sanford caved just like I said he would right?
yep — SG — I sure did. Incredible.
It’s no accident that the new site is being released on the day that new job losses were announced. Foes of the measure will keep aggressively pushing the line that EFCA would further damage the economy…
Right. We don’t have the EFCA, and we’re having massive job losses, so don’t pass it or we’ll have massive job losses!
And not that “forced choice” needs any more explanation as a propaganda term, but non-”Right-to-Work” states are routinely referred to as “forced unionization states” on wingnut radio.
I hate being forced to make choices.
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I was forced to make a choice this morning. I had to choose whether or not to go to work.
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I would really have preferred to duck this decision. Just lie in bed and pretend there’s no issue. But if I’d done that long enough, I would have chosen to not go into work today.
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Boy, doesn’t life ѕuck enough without gummint forcing me to make any more burdensome choices?
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Why shouldn’t labor have to defend the two key provisions in the EFCA? It’s not enough for the proponent of any legislation to talk only about the intent behind the bill. At some point, the details of the remedy have to become the center of the discussion.
If you’re sick and a doctor says you need an operation, your first question is, “what’s this operation going to do to me?” If the doctor simply repeated the fact that you were sick, you would consider that to be non-responsive.
Same with labor on this issue. Yes workers have had it tough the past 10 years. But why is removing the guarantee of a secret ballot and binding arbitration going to make things better? It’s not some clever PR tactic to force labor to answer those questions. It’s inherent in the process of getting any bill passed. If labor can’t answer those questions in a way that the public will agree with, the bill deserves to die.
Is that a hard concept for you, Greg? Seems obvious to me.
If Workforce Fairness Institute isn’t a Richard Berman front group it appears to be coordinating with him.
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EFCA appears to make unionization potentially secret from the employer and that’s what has the right wing so freaked out. With EFCA the employer wouldn’t (as easily) be able to intimidate and threaten workers jobs should they chose to unionize.
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There’s been decades of examples of employers intimidating and threatening workers jobs. There has been no equivalent in those same decades of unions doing the same thing (except in right wingers fevered imaginations).
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