Senator Arlen Specter has announced that he will not vote for the mis-named Employee Free Choice Act which would eliminate the private ballot for workers:
Senator Arlen Specter, who was the lone Republican to side with Democrats on the Senate's last vote on union-organizing legislation, announced Tuesday that he would not vote for this session's bill. * * * With some Democrats expressing ambivalence on the bill, the Democratic sponsors indicated before Mr. Specter's announcement that they did not have the 60 votes to move it forward.
The bill would let workers chose to form a union when a majority of company employees sign a card requesting one -- the so-called card check provision -- rather than requiring a secret-ballot election run by the National Labor Relations Board in accordance with current law. Without a secret ballot workers would be subject to violent intimidation by corrupt union organizers, and for this reason the overwhelming majority of union households are adamantly against the Employee Free Choice Act. Indeed, in New York City Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union is on pace to hold its "first election free of mob influence in at least 30 years" due to the implementation of procedural safeguards to ensure the secrecy of the vote. Eliminating the private ballot through the enactment of card check will be an open invitation to the mob to return to its old stomping grounds, and will reverse decades of progress that law enforcement has made in ridding unions of this corrupting influence. It's a shame that Democratic Party hacks are more interested in serving their machine bosses and union leaders rather than representing the real interests of actual workers.
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