EFCA alone not enough

Journalist and author Joe Conason penned a dead-on piece over at Salon.com yesterday on the two-faced position of Bush and Cheney in vigorously advocating democracy and liberty abroad while promoting the vigorous suppression of it here in this country:

Nobody talks about the democratic way more fervently than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who have so often proclaimed that the historic mission of the United States is to expand liberty around the world. The Bush administration frequently denounces governments that suppress free speech, intimidate citizens and tamper with elections, expressing outrage over violations of human rights and self-determination in states such as Cuba, Iran, Myanmar and Zimbabwe.

So what would our great advocates of democracy say about a regime that routinely deprives people of their livelihood for speaking out freely on public issues? What would they say about a place where citizens are forced to listen to propaganda -- or where voters have to run a gantlet of armed police to enter a voting booth? How would they describe a system that distributes bribes, spies on dissidents and threatens everyone who dares to vote the "wrong" way with the direst possible consequences?

If they told the truth, they would be forced to admit that those awful conditions still exist on American soil, oppressing millions of workers whose employers use such tactics to prevent them from forming or joining a labor union. (Remainder of story here, and I recommend it as a good read.)

Conason's latest book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, is now out and AlterNet has an excerpt from it here.

And building on an excellent post by Ezra Klein at TAP about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), Nancy Scola's "Who Workers Fear" piece at MyDD yesterday helps debunk the "but-the-union-will-intimidate-the-workers" smoke-screen raised by corporate and other anti-labor interests in protest of EFCA. At trip to both of those posts I also recommend.

Like Klein and others, I don't think EFCA would pass a senate filibuster, or garner enough votes to override a certain veto by Bush. There's more than sufficient objective evidence to warrant the reforms in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that EFCA provides, but I don't see it getting out of the senate in the 110th Congress.

Even when it is passed into law, which I believe will be the case in the 111th Congress, I also don't see EFCA resulting in increasing union membership in this country to a level I think is necessary for labor unions to serve as the major organized voice for democracy, liberty and progressive politics in this country. But don't get me wrong, the argument that EFCA will not add significantly to union membership rolls is not an argument for not passing it. In addition to allowing the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to certify workers' choices for union representation based solely on the submission of valid signed union designations from a simple majority of the workers, EFCA would also provide two other important and much needed revisions to the NLRA:

• stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations, and
• mandatory mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.

But, in terms of serving as the catalyst for huge U.S. union membership growth, I think EFCA alone will not be responsible for that. Sure, I think union membership will increase as a result of EFCA, as it rightly should, but I believe such growth will be relatively modest. If EFCA were responsible for, say, a 15% increase in union membership ranks over the 2006 level (an increase of about 2.3 million members), that would certainly be terrific and nothing at all to scoff at. But for reform to result in an increase of union membership to the level, say, of 1/3rd of the workforce, an increase of over 27 million union members from the 2006 level, our brainwashed culture would need a frontal lobotomy to change the philosophical disorder that is one of the primary contributors responsible for the ultra-low unionization rates in the U.S.--the doctrine of individualism.