Sen. Orrin Hatch on the Employee Free Choice Act
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAamIryaRHE Senator Orrin Hatch and Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus discussed the impact of EFCA on CNBC. Here is how blogger Nick Osinki described it: On CNBC this morning, they were interviewing the founders of Home Depot and they put it very bluntly. To paraphrase, they explained that this bill, if passed, would mean that a union [more...]

Posted Wed, 23 Jul 2008 .

Alter: Obama should take on teachers unions
Jonathan Alter has an interesting piece in Newsweek on education reform. He says that Obama can solidify his support among moderates by going up against teachers unions on the issues of merit-pay and teacher accountability. He runs through some of the more depressing statistics about the state of education today, including US students’ math skills [more...]

Posted Tue, 15 Jul 2008 .

Poor Elections Record

Freedom of choice is a matter at the very center of our national labor relations policy, and a secret election is the preferred method of gauging choice.

— Avecor v. NLRB, D.C. Circuit, 1991

Bruce Raynor, president of the union UNITE HERE, explains: "There's no reason to subject the workers to an election." One SEIU local leader has flatly admitted to the Wall Street Journal, "We don't do elections." And no wonder. Even though unions have ultimate control over if and when certification elections are held, they still lose four in ten elections they call. And employees have chosen no representation at all in more than 2,000 certification and decertification elections over a two-year period.

According to the National Labor Relations Board 's annual report figures for cases closed in 2003 and 2004 (covering all NLRB-overseen certification and decertification elections):

All Representation Elections	2004	2005
Overall Union win (%)	53.2 %	56.8 %
AFL-CIO Win (%)	50.8 %	53.8 %
Elections in which no union was chosen	1,272	1,145

In the first half of the government's Fiscal Year 2005:

Unions organized about 24 percent fewer workers through elections than in the same period in the previous year.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organized half as many workers through elections as it did in the first half of 2004.
The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) won only 43 percent of the elections it held.

Source: Bureau of National Affairs, Dec. 9, 2005