Checking Workers, Binding Employers

Union bosses will be the only winners under the Employee Free Choice Act

Shikha Dalmia | July 20, 2009

Big Labor is on a roll. With the installation of Minnesota Democrat Al Franken to the Senate, and another change of heart by Sen. Arlen Specter, the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has just scored two more votes. To secure the remaining votes for a filibuster-proof majority, unions staged a massive rally in Arkansas to pressure Blanche Lincoln, the state's Democratic senator who has withdrawn her support for the bill, to pull a Specter and change her mind yet again.

Arkansas is ground-zero for unions because it is a right-to-work state with low union enrollment. EFCA's elimination of secret ballot elections for unionization has garnered most of the critical attention. But the bill contains another controversial provision: compulsory arbitration. This would be no less destructive to the rights of employers and workers, and the economy as a whole. Exhibit A: Michigan.

In 1969, the Wolverine State embraced a form of compulsory arbitration nearly identical to the one proposed in EFCA to resolve disputes with its police and firefighters. Years later, Detroit mayor Coleman Young—who had authored the original law as state senator—rued what he had done. "We now know that compulsory arbitration has been a failure," he lamented to the National Journal in 1981. "Slowly, inexorably, compulsory interest arbitration has destroyed sensible fiscal management and has caused more damage to the public service than the strikes it was designed to prevent."

Most citizens agree. Just seven years ago 54 percent of Michigan voters turned down a union-sponsored ballot proposition to extend compulsory arbitration to all state employees. Nearly every newspaper in the state—liberal and conservative—editorialized against it. Why?
READ THE REST AT REASON