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Regarding Dr. John David’s commentary, “Make it Easier to Unionize Workplace”:  Labor unions certainly have their place in a contemporary American economy, but not at the expense of employee free choice and economic security. Indeed, the Employee Free Choice Act would severely erode the freedom enjoyed by employees for nearly 75 years to make a private, fully-informed decision about whether or not they want a union to represent them.

Too often, the losing party in a union election - the company or the union - blames its loss on the opposing party’s “coercive and underhanded” tactics. In reality though, the party that loses the election is most often the party that should lose it.  Continued

The Worcester Telegram - One of the worst ideas in U.S. labor history continues to percolate on Capitol Hill, and could come to the fore soon after President-elect Barack Obama takes office.

The misnamed Employee Free Choice Act would take away workers’ right to vote for or against unionization by secret ballot — replacing the elections with a card-check system that would open workers to intimidation and harassment and whereby a union could install itself as the designated bargaining unit with as little as 30 percent support. Continued

There is a curiously dated logic in unions insisting that Congress pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which belies the back and forth accusatory rhetoric of intimidation between business and big labor. There are two principal methods for employees to join and command employers to recognize their union’s collective bargaining request. First: Company workers can get at least 30 percent of their colleagues to sign petition cards requesting representation, send the cards to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and have them oversee a secret ballot election. Second: If more than half of the workers sign up for representation, a union is deemed legitimate through “card check” procedures without Labor Relations getting involved at all, but the employer has the right to request a secret ballot election.

Union leadership seems to believe that mandating card check and removing the employer’s right to request a secret-ballot election will somehow reflexively grow their numbers now and into the future to the 35 percent national representation they enjoyed in the 1970s. “We believe that it is integral to fixing the economy,” said William Samuel, legislative director for the AFL-CIO in a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Times this week. “We hope it will be among the first bills to move through Congress. I have no doubt that it will pass and it will be signed.” Continued

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check. Continued

WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Saturday that Congress was not told the truth about the bailout of the nation’s financial system and should take back what is left of the $700 billion “blank check” it gave the Bush administration.

“It is just outrageous that the American people don’t know that Congress doesn’t know how much money he (Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) has given away to anyone,” the Oklahoma Republican told the Tulsa World.

“It could be to his friends. It could be to anybody else. We don’t know. There is no way of knowing.” Continued