Richard Epstein (who praised John Locke while touting a flat-rate tax in this Carolina Journal Radio clip) tackles the poorly named Employee Free Choice Act in a new column:
The public outcry against the card-check system apparently has taken
its toll. One sign of the unions’ weakness on this issue is their
deliberate obfuscation of the issue. The secret-ballot election would
remain “available” under the act, according to no less an authority
than Rachel Maddow. But of course it would be available only at the
option of the union and never the employer, which means that were this
provision to become law, secret-ballot elections would go the way of
the dodo bird.
So now it appears that unions may be prepared to scrap the card
check – if they can salvage the more insidious portion of the EFCA, its
compulsory arbitration provision.
Here is what the key provision says: Once mediation has failed, the
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service “shall refer the dispute to
an arbitration board established in accordance with such regulations as
may be prescribed by the Service.” The arbitration decision then binds
the parties for two years.
For the layman, here is what it means: An outpost of the Labor
Department, the mediation service, will set the terms of all new labor
contracts in the United States. It will do so under provisions that are
undefined under the act. The FMCS will have sole authority to pick the
arbitration panel, which will have the power to draft, on its own
initiative, detailed contract provisions, tables and appendices that
can run to more than 1,000 pages. The arbitrators’ decision will be
final: The EFCA allows neither employers nor unions to appeal
arbitrators’ decisions to a neutral judicial body.
No one has the slightest idea how this bill would work in practice.
