Opinion
Card Check could also mean wage and price controls
Examiner Editorial
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March 10, 2009
If you think General Motors and Chrysler are models of the unionized workplace, you will no doubt cheer news that Card Check – known to union bosses and prostrate lawmakers by its sachrinely official name, the Employee Free Choice Act - was formally introduced in Congress Tuesday by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-IA, and Rep. George Miller, D-CA. Harkin, Miller and their union overseers want to kill the secret ballot in workplace representation elections. Doing that, according to economist Anne Layne-Farrar, who studied the card check system in Canada, would mean 600,000 lost jobs following every three percent gain in union membership. So Card Check would make it even harder for the millions of people who are now unemployed to find new jobs.
But there’s something else in Card Check that its backers hope nobody notices, unless it’s needed as the basis of a legislative compromise later this year. It’s an obscure but potentially more dangerous provision that empowers federal arbitrators to set wages and benefits for employees in newly unionized companies. The bill imposes a binding arbitration process if union leaders cannot reach agreement with company officials within 90 days. At one party’s request, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) would then step in. If the parties still disagree within another 30 days, an FMCS-appointed arbitrator would impose wage and benefit levels for the next two years, regardless of the economic consequences. Somewhere Richard Nixon, the last president to impose government wage and price controls on private companies, is laughing manically.
Former Bush Labor Department officials Vincent Vernuccio and Loren Smith, Jr. correctly point out that Card Check thus gives union negotiators little incentive to bargain in good faith, knowing that their every outrageous demand would be a starting point for the binding arbitration most likely conducted by government bureaucrats. Said arbitrators would have sole discretionary power to force employers to make concessions far beyond what they would otherwise accept. Small businesses with limited resources would be particularly vulnerable to this new form of government meddling. The bill even bars workers from overriding their union leaders and terminating the binding arbitration process even if doing so would save the company and everybody’s jobs. This is progress?
Wage and benefit packages with no relation to market realities have brought Chrysler and General Motors to the brink of bankruptcy. Card Check would force a similarly ludicrous system on many more still-healthy American businesses. If President Barack Obama – who vigorously supports Card Check – and Congress truly want to get America’s economy moving again, defeating Card Check and its compulsory arbitration provision is a must.
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