Congress' Chain Needs Yanking When It Comes to Card Check

With everything Congress and President Barack Obama have on their plate in Washington, there are a lot of legislative wishlists that are getting shoved to the back burner.

Thankfully, one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful constituencies — Big Labor — has seen its top legislative priority put on hold: the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, or the union card check bill.

The so-called Employee Free Choice Act passed the House of Representatives in the 110th Congress but failed to get out of the Senate. So far, no legislator has introduced the bill in the 111th Congress. But that hasn’t stopped America’s labor unions from salivating at the prospect of being able to force their way into workplaces across the country and be able to unionize them with no secret-ballot election.

That’s why so many business owners — both large and small, Democrats and Republicans — are vehemently opposed to the legislation. They rightly see it as an attempt by unions, which have lost members, clout and money over the decades, to get their noses into the workplace.

Even a Democrat as liberal as former U.S. Sen. George McGovern has expressed his strong opposition to card check. Writing in the Wall Street Journal last summer, he quite properly blasted his party for colluding with its Big Labor backers in an attempt to deny workers the inalienable right to a vote by secret ballot.

That’s why it’s all the more surprising why three local members of Congress — Democrats Jim Webb and Mark Warner in the U.S. Senate and Tom Perriello in the House — are so difficult to pin down when asked about their positions on card check.

Late last week, The News & Advance asked the spokesmen for each where their bosses stood on the issue. Each responded that they support the legislation, as introduced in the 110th Congress but believe there are still changes that should be made. Each one of them, though, proclaims support for Virginia’s Right to Work law.

It shouldn’t be a difficult decision to make, even for a politician coming from a party as beholden to Big Labor as the Democrats. Do you support the ability of workers to freely choose, by secret ballot, whether to affiliate with a union? It’s a no-brainer.

It was even a no-brainer for Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., one of the most liberal members of the House and a chief patron of the legislation in the 110th Congress.

Except he backed secret-ballot elections for workers in Mexico. Just not in America, it seems.

Back in 2001, Miller and some of his cohorts behind card check legislation wrote a letter to the government of Mexico calling for secret-ballot elections in union voting in that country. He even introduced a resolution in Congress that year to that effect.

Why, we wonder, would Rep. Miller support rights for Mexican workers that he would strip from U.S. workers? It makes no sense.

And it makes no sense to us why Sens. Webb and Warner and Rep. Perriello can’t just come to the conclusion that American workers today deserve the same rights Rep. Miller was so protective of in 2001 for Mexican workers.

It’s not a hard choice, gentlemen: Do you support the right of an American worker to decide, in secret and in private, whether he wants to be represented by a labor union on the job? Yes or no? And no dodging the question.

Unfortunately, that’s what Sens. Webb and Warner and Rep. Perriello are doing on this matter. They’re trying to have it both ways, cuddling up to Big Labor in Washington and voicing their concerns back home.

That’s just not good enough. Make up your minds, folks.