Few takers at anti-union card check press conference

I wrote a brief article on a press conference on the Employee Free Choice Act for the Baton Rouge Business Report, but the longer version didn't make it to the BRBR Web site, so here it is; the original blurb is here.

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Few takers at anti-union card check press conference

By Todd R. Brown

A few local business leaders decided to rally Wednesday against a possible revised Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize and would mandate a government arbitration process.

“It will devastate small business as we know it,” says Patricia Felder, co-owner with her husband of Felder’s Collision Parts and a Baton Rouge Area Chamber board member. “I’m certainly not anti-union. I’m very anti-forced union.”

The event, attended by the Business Report and a local TV news crew, attacked the card-check provision of a federal bill to let organizers gather a majority of signatures from a company’s employees in order to declare a union.

“Everyone is going to know how you voted,” says Jim Patterson with the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, calling the free choice act “a coercion of workers into the union fold.”

Alvin Bargas, president of Associated Builders and Contractors’ Pelican Chapter, agreed, saying, “A person’s vote is his private business. People tend not to put their private business in the public. They may not ‘vote’ their true conscience.”

Julie Cherry, secretary treasurer of the Louisiana AFL-CIO, counters that National Labor Relations Board data shows “there’s been far, far more employer coercion than union intimidation … in all reports and in those deemed to be credible. The person who has the money usually has the most power and the most ability to coerce.”

She says workers already have the right to conduct a majority signup campaign with their employer’s blessing; otherwise they are compelled to do a secret ballot after 30 percent of employees show support for a vote.

Felder says if a federal bureaucrat gets to handle the arbitration in a dispute with workers, then “he makes the decisions. I’ve lost control of my company.”

Further, Patterson says the act would fast-track the process for agreeing to an initial contract between workers and management, giving both sides less time to bargain before arbitrators take over and make a binding agreement that would last two years.

“There’s a lot of fear out there about what that means to the employer,” Cherry says. “We see it as an incentive to sit at the table and bargain reasonably.”

She pointed to the example of Avondale Shipyard near Westwego, where workers won a union vote in the early ’90s but had to “jump through hoops and over hurdles” while the employer allegedly stalled the contract process, appealing the election for six years and taking another year to agree to terms.

Patterson said several times at the rally, which was moved unexpectedly from the Holiday Inn to the Crowne Plaza hotel next door, apparently without notice, that “there will be those out there decrying how business treats workers” during the Labor Day weekend.

Yet Cherry says she only knows of one relevant pro-labor event, a parade Monday from the Piggly Wiggly in Baker, La., to the civic center for a picnic, sponsored by the Baton Rouge Central Labor Council.

She says there are several revisions to the free choice act pending but that there likely will be no timetable on the bill until the health care debate is settled.

Union members canvassed and campaigned for Barack Obama in the fall based on his support for the act at the time.