Linda Chavez Sees Social Democracy Around the Corner
Dave Weigel gets an intriguing quote from Linda Chavez in his article on Employee Free Choice Act opponents:
“This is basically about a 40-year struggle to bring the social democratic model to America,” said Linda Chavez, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and President George W. Bush’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor, on Thursday. “Unfortunately, I think it’s going to succeed. Having 58 or 59 Senate seats, instead of 55 seats-that makes a big difference.”
I wish I shared Chavez’s pessimism (or optimism, or whatever you want to call it) about the right’s odds of blocking a social democratization of the United States. Even if EFCA were to pass in its strong form, which I’m not at all certain it can, I think that would still leave us with a long way to go. I suppose the rhetorical function of this sort of right-wing rhetoric about “Europeanizing” America or a “social democratic” model is to get progressive to swiftly disavow any ambitions of changing the country in a serious way. But while of course it would be foolish to try to model U.S. social policy precisely on what exists in any foreign country, I actually think it’s quite important for progressives to sketch a view on the horizon of what sort of society progressive governance is supposed to create. And I think Chavez’s nightmare scenario of a country in which the middle and working classes earn a larger share of national income, in which educational attainment is rising rather than flat, in which people are healthier and live longer, in which crime is lower and fewer children grow up in poverty isn’t such a terrible place to start.
58 Responses to “Linda Chavez Sees Social Democracy Around the Corner”
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February 23rd, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Damn. I’d be excited, except that Linda Chavez is always wrong about everything.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Don’t forget very slow, or non-existent economic growth Matt.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Don’t forget to pay some attention to facts, not just your stupid ideology.
http://www.indexmundi.com/sweden/gdp_real_growth_rate.html
http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/gdp_real_growth_rate.html
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Perhaps Linda Chavez doesn’t know how many social democracies now have a higher GDP per capita than the US.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Steve, don’t forget not to cherry pick facts, Steve:
http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html
http://www.indexmundi.com/sweden/gdp_per_capita_(ppp).html
and don’t forget that Sweden has a huge VAT, so the actual purchasing power of a Swede’s money is dramatically less (a single beer there costs twenty bucks in an ordinary bar). Also don’t forget that Sweden has spent the last twenty years chipping away at its social democracy in favor of a more open, U.S. style economy, so showing that Sweden now is closer to the US in growth may say more about those changes than about the virtues of social democracy. And don’t even mention Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:34 pm
EFCA isn’t about bringing a Social Democratic model to the US. If it was about bringing anything democratic, then it wouldn’t involve getting rid of a democratic secret ballot and replacing it with a public card-check. We should be improving the secret ballot process, not replacing it with a union intimidation process. The more press the EFCA gets in its current state, the more people will realize that it is pro-union rather than pro-worker, and the harder it will be to pass through a more reasonable EFCA in the future.
As I understand it, the problem is that the current system allows management intimidation, because “no vote” in the secret ballot is a vote against unionization, so management can intimidate employees not to vote at all. That is a serious problem that does need to be fixed.
The problem with the proposed system (EFCA) is that instead of getting rid of management intimidation, it just allows unions to intimidate as well. Union reps can corner workers in their homes and try to coerce them to sign a union card, picking them off one by one. Plus, Management still will know who is for unionization and who is against it and has the opportunity for retribution.
So EFCA makes the current problem worse, not better.
There seem to be several better ways to reform the organization process.
Like, get rid of “no vote = no union” by requiring all employees to vote, or by calculating 50% based on number of votes instead of number of employees, assuming at least half (or whatever) of the employees vote.
We should be trying to make the process fairer and more democratic, and instead we are trying to level the playing field to allow more intimidation. EFCA is pro union, but it is not pro-worker. And progressive blogs are refusing to debate these core issues honestly. Yglesias ignores it, and the pro-EFCA commenters just offer vague insults and name calling. You wouldn’t believe how many times I was accused of fellating corporate entities while I was just trying to get a basic understanding of EFCA.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Why oh why, which ones? Norway during a oil price boom? You’re not really going to try and count Luxembourg, are you? Or did you mean the UAE?
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Well, it’s not wrong that the U.S was much more social democratic in the 1930s and 40s, when union density was much higher than today.
EFCA might make the U.S more social democratic, but it would take a long time, even under the best estimates. Back in the 40s and 50s, when unions were still a going concern, organizing tended to increase density rates by 1 percentage point per yer. Given that we’re currently at 12.4%, it would take 10-20 years to get back to where we once were.
February 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Sancho sure doesn’t cherry pick facts either:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
PPP is a worse measure than nominal GDP, since it depends entirely on assumptions made by the statistician. So we have:
US: $47,025 (#17)
Sweden: $55,624 (#8)
Also don’t forget that Sweden has spent the last twenty years chipping away at its social democracy in favor of a more open, U.S. style economy
From Wiki:
Sounds like crazy Wall Street-style laisser-faire!
And don’t even mention Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc.
Why not? France now has a higher GDP per capita than the US, and Germany is just behind. Spain is coming back after decades in isolation. Only Italy is doing badly, but it is more a kleptocracy than a social democracy.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:04 pm
That would be great, Matthew in Austin, except that EFCA doesn’t eliminate the secret ballot. If that’s how the employees want to run THEIR organizing process, they will be free to do so.
I suppose it’s possible that employers who insist on an election (and the several weeks of pre-election “informational meetings” and firing “for cause”) when the workers don’t want one are really just concerned about looking out for the little guy but…I’m sorry, I can’t come up with a plausible ending for this sentence, even a parodic one.
BTW, workers are allowed to DEcertify a union by signature, without an election. All it takes is a majority of employees signing a petition saying they don’t want the union to represent them, and the company doesn’t have to negotiate with the union. Oddly enough, I’ve yet to hear a single EFCA opponent express the slightest bit of discomfort with the fact that a union can be decertified with no secret ballot. Odd, that.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:08 pm
because “no vote” in the secret ballot is a vote against unionization, so management can intimidate employees not to vote at all.
This is incorrect. Labor law only requires a majority of the workers who cast a vote, not of all workers.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:22 pm
ed: An on earlier comment thread here, another poster had claimed that a no-vote was a vote against unionization, and I assumed he knew what he was talking about. But you very well may be right. Perhaps there is some threshold of total votes (51% of the workforce) required, and non-votes prevent the total from hitting that number? Not sure.
joe: The union wants card-check because it can intimidate employees one-by-one to sign their card, even if the employees would want to vote against the union in a secret ballot. The pro-union groups know this, and want EFCA so that they can work this intimidation. Those same organizers will fight against the employees who might prefer a secret ballot, using the same intimidation tactics. They’ll say “you only want a secret ballot because because you don’t want to say to our face that you don’t want a union” – and they’ll be right! Do you really think the workers will be able to pull off a vote for a secret ballot with the union organizers actively trying to prevent it? EFCA will effectively eliminate secret ballot and turn organization drives to nothing but peer pressure and intimidation, and that is exactly how the union leaders want it. Polls of unionized workers show strong majorities against the elimination of secret ballot for this very reason – they know how tough union organizers are to deal with and know how awful it will be to have to fight them off when they come knocking on their door at home each night.
I am not denying the problems with the current process – employers who don’t what unions do abuse the system to intimidate workers into not voting or voting against the union. But card-check is an awful alternative, not an improvement. More and more people are learning about what card-check is, and it won’t pass in its current form. And if it gets enough bad press before it gets killed, it may really hurt honest reform that the Democrats will try to push through later.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Why oh why, I did say “chipping,” not “utterly dismantling” so your second point is not apropos. Your other points just say that the Euro is strong now, which hasn’t had much effect on the lives of anyone but tourists.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Why oh why, nobody likes neo-liberals. If you all had to stand on your own as a party, you wouldn’t get 10% of the vote.
February 23rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Soullite, you apparently don’t know what ‘neo-liberal’ means. A large part of the Republican party (or at least, their donors) could be described as neo-liberal.
I am a social democrat like Bernie Sanders, as should be obvious from my posts in this thread.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Linda Chavez ought to be happy we’re getting social democracy and not democratic socialism.
Hey Matt, why go with the wimpy rose when you can use the awesome PvdA logo? And speaking of the Netherlands, how about a post about the Social-Economic Council? Or Finland’s Comprehensive Income Policy Agreement?
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:36 pm
ed: An on earlier comment thread here, another poster had claimed that a no-vote was a vote against unionization, and I assumed he knew what he was talking about.
Perhaps you mean this thread:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/10/vulgar_marxism.php
The other poster was a guy named Jason Lefkowitz; as you can see, I believed him too, at first, but then I looked into it myself and found out he was wrong. The strange thing is, Jason apparently has a blog devoted to labor and union issues!! I can’t help but wonder how many of the other “facts” I read about this issue are wrong or exaggerated.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Steve LaBonne is economically illiterate if he thinks single-year comparisons of GDP growth tell us anything meaningful about the merits of different kinds of economic policy.
why oh why is economically illiterate if he thinks nominal dollar GDP per capita comparisons tell us anything meaningful about differences in wealth and standard of living.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
why oh why is economically illiterate if he thinks nominal dollar GDP per capita comparisons tell us anything meaningful about differences in wealth and standard of living.
And PPP does? Do you even know how PPP GDP is calculated? Hint: the first step is taking nominal numbers. Then you throw in some unprovable assumptions about how people behave.
As for ’standards of living’, those are much less controversial than GDP to compare countries. Things like life expectancy, education, abortion rate, crime and such; and Sweden comes on top compared to the US, by a large margin.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:45 pm
I suspect that EFCA would simply motivate companies to shift offices and operations overseas. Or to buy more industrial robots from Japan. I guess the Republicans aren’t the only ones pushing tired (and just plain silly) ideas. The country is pretty fragile right now. Corporations don’t need to worry about union muscle; they need to worry about creating jobs. Unfortunately, when Democrats get fired up about Big Labor, they give a breath of oxygen to the Republican extremists: finally, Rush Limbaugh will have a LEGITIMATE complaint about the Democrats. I realize that labor unions sometimes do a lot of good, and that not all union jobs pay like the United Auto Workers. But I think the country needs to come together and work on some serious problems, and beefing up Big Labor is not helpful right now.
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:46 pm
Social Democracy is premised on the belief that the productive sector of the economy is healthy enough that it can carry the burden of giving everyone “and a pony!”-level benefits. A look at our superiors in Europe indicates that their economies are faltering under this load. Shouldn’t we see if they can avoid falling off the cliff before we similarly burden our economy?
February 23rd, 2009 at 6:57 pm
I’d say “economically illiterate” is far too kind a way to dscribe why oh why’s brand of stupidity. He seems to seriously believe that there are no price differences between different countries. A dollar in the U.S. buys the same amount of goods and services as a dollar in Sweden. It’s beyond stupid.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:02 pm
If you want to compare the U.S. to Sweden, then you should compare whites in Sweden (over 90% of the population) to White, non-Hispanics in the U.S. (at around 67% of the population).
I love how prorgressives want to compare the U.S. with its large Hispanics, immigrants, and black populations to some of the Whitest countries in the world and then say that all of American is bad. I guess the unlying racism of the left peeks through when the demonstrated their crush on Europe.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Anders, please tell us how you really feel. In particular, were 2002 exchange rates truer than they are now. And please defend the use of PPP to compare countries’ wealth and economical success, given than nominal GDP is used in its calculation, therefore any measurement error directly affects PPP numbers. Finally, if despite its lower GDP per capita the US really is better off than Sweden, please explain why Americans live shorter lives than Swedes, unlike 50 years ago.
I would call you incredibly stupid and other names but am waiting for your reply before reaching any conclusion.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:10 pm
To clarify: nominal GDP is an imperfect measure of how well a country is doing, since it depends so much on exchange rates. But PPP is even worse, a meaningless number made up by development economists and international bureaucrats.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Superdestroyer: You’re right, and the comparison is even more skewed than you think: Sweden is mostly populated by Nordics, who are of course Aryans, whereas many of America’s white people are Slavs and other such untermenschen. So we’re starting out with quite a disadvantage.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Why oh why, a ton of things go into life expectancy (diet, accident rate, etc.) other than economic well being. Fifty years ago, the United States was more resistant to famine and other deprivations than anywhere else in the world. By thirty years ago many European countries caught up to us on that. What we did was to some extent go overboard on prosperity, so that now food kills us by its excess, not its absence. The way the various factors play into that are complicated, so demagoguing the issue is silly.
On the other hand, what really is flat out clear are things like the number of possession a person has, the square footage of their living space, etc. On those matters the average poor American beats the middle class in many European countries. I can’t speak to Sweden, but I’ve lived in both Germany and Spain and seen a lot of French apartments and there’s just no way someone who’s lived both there and in the US can say with a straight face that the average western European has the same consumption-potential as the average American.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:30 pm
The Economist on Sweden’s long-term decline:
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:37 pm
A couple of notes:
1. Matthew in Austin – speaking as someone who actually does union organizing, I have to say you’re really swinging against a strawman here. Peer pressure isn’t illegal or morally wrong, and intimidation almost never happens in an organizing campaign because it’s a really dumb strategy. Leaving aside the fact that someone can de-sign after you talk to them, an intimidated worker is not going to be an active union member, they’re not going to go out on strike or respect picket lines or phonebank their peers or do any of the other thousands of things that you need members to do to have a successful union. Moreover, intimidation is already illegal – if someone’s doing it, it’s illegal.
The problem with the current system isn’t that employers can intimidate workers into not voting, it’s that they can widely intimidate workers into voting no, and then delay the vote and the counting of the vote, and fire people along the way. By the time that you actually get certification, they don’t have to agree to a first contract, and most employers will simply delay and appeal and delay, while firing activists along the way, until everyone’s so damn fed up or scared or no longer employed that they give up.
Shiva:
Most industries undergoing outsourcing and automation are already unionized. New organizing is going on in fields that are un-outsourcable – you can’t nurse from overseas, and robot truckers aren’t really viable.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:37 pm
why oh why writes:
And please defend the use of PPP to compare countries’ wealth and economical success, given than nominal GDP is used in its calculation, therefore any measurement error directly affects PPP numbers
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:40 pm
…. so, superdestroyer basically suggests that non-white people are an economic problem onto themselves, and then accuses the left of racism?
Ew.
—–
As to the ppp/nominal per-capita GDP discussion: These measures aren’t accounting for things like life-expectancy, health-care, attainability and affordability of higher education, et cetera. Social Democratic Countries, almost by definition, place a higher priority on these things. To account for that and measure over-all quality of life, we’d have to go to something like the Human Development Index.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:44 pm
Janus,
The Economist? Ha! Few other papers are now more discredited that this free-market fundamentalist, “Washington consensus” cheerleader. It spent all of the 90’s criticizing governments that refused to privatize Social security or the police. How good do they look now that the US and British financial sectors, on which much of those countries’ growth was based, are going down the drain?
What’s next, a CATO report predicting the end of the European Union and the need to privatize the Army?
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:49 pm
why oh why writes:
This is gibberish – the fact that nominal GDP is adjusted to produce PPP GDP means that PPP can’t be a better measure? According to that same “logic,” we also shouldn’t adjust for inflation when comparing standards of living in different time periods. Needless to say, that’s ludicrous – as ludicrous as assuming that an income of $800 per month in Argentina will produce the same standard of living as an income of $800 per month in the USA.
PPP calculations can never be perfect, but for purposes of assessing standards of living, they’re generally a big improvement over nominal GDP.
On the other hand, relying on GDP/capita at all isn’t a great way to assess standards of living. Doing so fails to take into account inequality, and requires us to assume (as in Sancho’s post) that things like “consumption potential” and apartment square footage are inherently more important than things like security, leisure, or not dying.
There are no truly objective and fully reliable measures. I think the UN’s human development index is pretty good.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Sancho,
Yes, American houses are much bigger. But I live in New York and apartments here are not much bigger than any European city I visited, except perhaps in Poland. Obviously density is lower in the US, so in many American towns people can enjoy large houses. Also, we have bigger cars.
That said, I’m not sure how it translates into “consumption-potential” in general. For example, the use of cellphones got popular in Western Europe sooner than even in New York.
February 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
There are no truly objective and fully reliable measures. I think the UN’s human development index is pretty good.
I agree.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
These measures aren’t accounting for things like life-expectancy, health-care, attainability and affordability of higher education, et cetera. Social Democratic Countries, almost by definition, place a higher priority on these things.
At the expense of other things, like freedom and growth and innovation. Not that I think you could make a persuasive case that Sweden is better off than the U.S. on any of the metrics you list, anyway.
To account for that and measure over-all quality of life, we’d have to go to something like the Human Development Index.
Another politically-charged index. Guess which country had the highest HDI in the most recent rankings? Iceland. Seen the news from Iceland, lately? The country is basically bankrupt. Turns out they were buying their prosperity through an incredibly fragile, high-risk economic model that imploded under the global recession.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I’d say “economically illiterate” is far too kind a way to dscribe why oh why’s brand of stupidity.
I think I put him in the Too Stupid To Bother With category. Hey, let’s ignore inflation and measure income changes in nominal dollars too!
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:15 pm
These measures aren’t accounting for things like life-expectancy, health-care, attainability and affordability of higher education, et cetera. Social Democratic Countries, almost by definition, place a higher priority on these things.
Freedom? Unlike, your government spying on you without warrants and torturing people to death. Did this happen in Sweden or the US?
Growth and Innovation? This isn’t the 90’s anymore. The Friedman-Reagan model has failed. One day, right-wingers will look at the data, and realize there has been no real growth under Bush. Innovation is great, it gave us Google and Yahoo (and, sadly, Microsoft). But the most innovative people in the last 10 years were working for banks and “innovated” the current mess.
But here is the part that really shows how deluded right-wingers are: “Not that I think you could make a persuasive case that Sweden is better off than the U.S. on any of the metrics you list, anyway”.
OK, Swedes on average live longer, have a more generalized access to health care, and study longer than Americans. Those are just facts. Yet people like carsond can write such sentences without feeling the need to back up any of their claims.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:21 pm
I think I put him in the Too Stupid To Bother With category. Hey, let’s ignore inflation and measure income changes in nominal dollars too!
Inflation changes numbers for the same country over a period, if you want to compare data. On the other hand, those PPP shenanigans claim to correct GDP via mysterious methods, using things like the price of bread at a grocery store or the average rent in a major city.
Not one of you “Hey, let’s use PPP!” guys have shown even the slightest hint that you actually understand how PPP GDP is actually calculated, and how much it relies on neo-classical theory.
Anyway, like N, I think the UN IDH is a much better way to compare countries. And yeah, Iceland’s IDH might fall, but it probably won’t fall below the US.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:35 pm
why oh why,
PPP adjusts for cost-of-living differences. The CPI adjusts for cost-of-living differences. Both work by looking at differences in the prices of goods and services. It makes no sense to claim that adjusting for cost-of-living differences within a single country over time is valid, but adjusting for cost-of-living differences between different countries is not.
You really are as dumb as everyone is saying.
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:46 pm
Carson, I didn’t try to defend the use of CPI. All economic measures are imperfect, and my main point was that nominal GDP is a better measure of a country’s economical strength than PPP. Now you haven’t given a single reason why it is proper to use PPP and claim the US are better off than Sweden. It seems the “cost-of-living” is indeed higher here, since Americans can’t afford to live longer than Swedes.
PPP tries to adjust for cost-of-living differences, and fails. Again, do you even know how PPP is calculated? And when another European firm buys the company you’re working for, will you still claim exchange rates don’t matter when it comes to assessing how well one country is doing? Oh well, at least you can complain about the price of gas because, you know, the plummeting dollar has nothing to do with it.
IDH > Nominal GDP > PPP GDP, if you want to compare countries. Now talk about IDH, and defend the non-social democrat systems.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
Speaking of illiteracy, try reading the comment to which I was responding, dumbass. I made a perfectly apropos reply to the bogus claim that welfare state = no or practically no economic growth. There is no such observable correlation.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:39 pm
No, your reply was stupid, you moron.
February 23rd, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Brilliantly argued, like a true conservative intellectual.
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:32 pm
I spy two instances — ‘carsond’ and ‘james’ — having a ‘conversation’.
Off your meds? Won’t they let you drive the three block, 5-mile trip to refill the prescription because you’ll piss yourself again in your mom’s Surburban?
February 24th, 2009 at 1:22 am
Don’t be mean to me.
Hey, guess what? I enjoy stuffing my penis between my legs and pretending I’m a girl! Mass transit sucks!
February 24th, 2009 at 4:29 am
As a somewhat conservative Swede it’s always a bit funny to listen to the debate the merits of “liberal Sweden”. Avoiding all the sreious/difficult points about PPP and life expectancy and all that I’ll just state that beer is expensive here but not “twenty bucks in an ordinary bar” like Sanchez said. Three USD at a cheaper place and seven at a fancy place.
Just to clear up the essential basics
February 24th, 2009 at 10:14 am
StevenAttewell: Thanks for the reasoned and explanative response. So many commentors leap immediately to reactionary rhetoric, and it is always nice when someone who disagrees with me does so in a logical manner that actually helps me better understand the opposing point of view.
I think I still have issue with two of your pro-EFCA points though:
First, “Peer pressure isn’t illegal or morally wrong” I think this is incorrect, especially without a secret ballot to safeguard against people voting against their conscience. The line between peer pressure and intimidation is extremely fuzzy, and something as important as unionization should be done free of both.
Second, I understand and agree with your description of the flaws in the current system. It still seems like the EFCA is way-overkill, and reform of the current system would be much more fair. We are able to do secret ballot elections in countless other environments without this much corruption and intimidation, we should be able to come up with a better system to get them to succeed in unionization drives as well.
Thanks again for your thoughtful response.
February 24th, 2009 at 10:20 am
PPP or no PPP seems like a trivial side issue compared to the fact that these statistics are *means* of highly non-normal distributions that are shaped differently from each other.
Try medians, or go back to Statistics 101 to understand why you should be using medians.
Of course, the US looks much worse using medians compared to almost anywhere else for precisely the reason medians are better for this sort of comparison: outliers don’t affect them much. The US’s income/wealth outliers are notorious, but they don’t indicate prosperity of the country.
Bill Gates walking into a bar doesn’t make everyone in the bar richer, even though the average income goes way up. (h/t Krugman)
February 24th, 2009 at 11:20 am
joe: The union wants card-check because it can intimidate employees one-by-one to sign their card, even if the employees would want to vote against the union in a secret ballot. The pro-union groups know this, and want EFCA so that they can work this intimidation.
…and they carved a B on my face.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:23 am
It really doesn’t take too long for the mask to fall off, and the people who start out concern trolling about certification procedures to come out and declare that they oppose EFCA because they oppose unions.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Joe, unions are great for some companies, but not for others. It should be up to the employees to make an informed decision without coercion from unions or management. EFCA does not help that happen. The goal should be to make sure that employees who want a union can get one; the goal should not be to force unions on employees who do not want one. That is the key difference being missed by too many EFCA supporters.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:32 am
superdestroyer:
I love how prorgressives[sic] want to compare the U.S. with its large Hispanics, immigrants, and black populations to some of the Whitest countries in the world and then say that all of American is bad. I guess the unlying racism of the left peeks through when the demonstrated their crush on Europe.
There have been many books written about why social democracy came to Europe and not to the US and I think part of it has to do with the fact the rightwing in the US was able to divide and conquer and scapegoat blacks and Mexicans in the US. The rightwing in Europe didn’t have that option.
(I just saw a good movie by Denzel Washington about the Southern strategy in action called the Great Debaters.)
Also part of it was that the rightwing in Europe was discredited by its association with fascism after WWII.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:58 am
See?
Still waiting for you to come out in opposition to allowing workers who don’t like their union to decertify it by petition instead of a secret ballot.
February 24th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Joe: “Still waiting for you to come out in opposition to allowing workers who don’t like their union to decertify it by petition instead of a secret ballot.”
I am in opposition to that as well. Everything should be by secret ballot. We should remove the possibility of coercion wherever possible.
I promise I’m not some secret anti-union advocate. I just don’t like them being forced on workers through unfair pressure.
February 24th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
We should remove the possibility of coercion wherever possible.
Unless it’s the coercion employed by employers in the weeks before a union election the workers don’t want to hold?
This bill is a RESPONSE to intimidation, a SOLUTION to intimidation.
February 24th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Unless it’s the coercion employed by employers in the weeks before a union election the workers don’t want to hold?
The workers DO want to hold the elections. I am sure you are aware of the Reuters poll that 75% of union households oppose EFCA because of the lack of secret ballot. The workers want their choice in these votes kept secret and feel that is a basic right, and EFCA supporters are trying to take this right away from the workers! So don’t claim to be protecting the workers from an election they don’t want, when union households have clearly spoken that they want no part of card check.
April 19th, 2009 at 5:24 am
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