Hilda Solis' nomination is on hold, and the questions the GOP wants answers to come back to card check. The formal name is the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA. "Card check" is incredibly nuanced, and how you feel about it is generally related to how people explain it. And whether card check passes has a lot to do with how unionization processes will change or stay the same, and thus, the importance of Solis' answer.
She has not yet explained her position, saying that she and the President have not yet discussed it. Which makes sense if, as a Cabinet official, you want to tow the Administration line. However, the bill has come up before, and while it died, she voted for it as a Congresswoman.
So what is card check? Here's how it gets polled from each side. From the IIE*:
Pollster John McLaughlin, working for the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace,the question this way: "There is a bill in Congress called the Employee Free Choice Act which would effectively replace a federally supervised secret ballot election with a process that requires a majority of workers to simply sign a card to authorize organizing a union and the workers' signatures would be made public to their employer, the union organizers and their co-workers. Do you support or oppose Congress passing this legislation?"
From Labour:
The AFL-CIO's polling firm, Hart Research Associaties, asks respondents whether they'd support legislation that "[a]llows employees to have a union once a majority of employees in a workplace sign authorization cards indicating they want to form a union."
The foundation of modern labor law, the Wagner Act of 1935, provided a path to union recognition when a majority of workers in a workplace signed union authorization cards — simple and fair.
When labor adversaries passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman’s veto, however, employers gained the right to reject the workers’ union authorization cards and to petition the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election to determine if a workplace should become union.
But the NLRB election process bears little resemblance to elections to choose our leaders for local, state and federal government. In the run-up to NLRB elections, employers pull out all the stops to intimidate workers into rejecting the union. These abuses are well-documented, including mandatory attendance at anti-union meetings, one-on-one meetings, threats to close the business if the union wins the vote, and even firing workers for pro-union activity.
The EFCA would give workers, not employers, the right to decide how to express the choice about going union: through the card-check process OR through the NLRB election process.
If passed, the EFCA will help expand the number of workers who enjoy union wages and union benefits like health insurance and retirement plans. If passed, the EFCA will help expand the number of workers who have a voice on the job through their union.
The problem is that unions spent untold millions to get a Democratic President and Congress, and get the EFCA enacted. (It has previously passed the House, died in the Senate, and was, of course, detested by the Bushies.) And still, there may well not be the votes necessary in the Senate to pass it. NOT passing it would be worse than not bringing it to the floor, as explained by Ambinder.
So what of Solis? Does she say "I supported it before, and still do" or say "My personal views are subservient to the dictates of the Administration position"? If she backs card check, and it fails, as Ambinder says, there will be blood on the floor. If she back-burners it, it would be bad for Democratic-Labour relations. It is, currently, the elephant in the room.
