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 .

Report: Union Math, Union Myths

Read the Full Report (.pdf, 88k)

Since its peak in the 1950s, union membership in the private sector has steadily dropped. To explain the decline, labor leaders have scapegoated businesses for intimidating employees during organizing campaigns. To justify the claim, they cite statistics from union-affiliated researchers which suggest that a significant number of employees are fired in the organizing process. But data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) do not—in any way—substantiate the notion that tens of thousands of employees are wrongly fired each year.

By logically linking organizing campaigns with Unfair Labor Practices, we determined that only 2.7 percent of union organizing campaigns feature an employee illegally fired (and offered reinstatement, typically with back pay). Furthermore, we demonstrate that other research on the subject relies on outdated assumptions that do not represent current NLRB data on the issue.