Dear Santa - Please don’t deliver “card checking” Signed Tech Community

[Ron Wright]

An interesting article in The Hill (Capital Hill Newspaper - thanks Dave Zerbee for sending the link). It discusses how the tech associations are lining up against proposed legislation that favors the labor unions ability to organize in a company by a simple petition rather than secret ballot. You can just guess the dangerous pressure on employees by union organizers and disruptive nature of such a process being allowed in a work environment.

The Unions leaders see this as their number one priority to stem the drop in union membership and will be calling in all the election time favors with the big “Ds” to pass this legislation in the next Congress.

This will need to be stopped in Congress because as quoted in the article, if it gets to the White House, get ready for the smiling Union Leaders photo opportunity at the signing:
“Obama, however, also voted for card-check last time it came to a vote on cloture in the Senate. Unions overwhelmingly backed his presidential campaign, and he has promised to sign the bill if it reaches his desk.”

We can not let this legislation reach his desk.

Unfortunately, we have already lost one vote from the switch in representation in the Northern Virginia technology community when Republican Tom Davis retired and Democrat Gerry Connolly won in November. Just read Connolly’s comments on Card Check:

“Connolly supports the bill because he believes it will level the playing field, which he says has long been tilted in favor of businesses. He blamed policies pushed by the Bush administration for stifling union growth.

“We have to redress the gross imbalance of the last eight years. I don’t think this legislation [would] even be here if hadn’t been the relentless hostility against labor by the Bush administration,” he said.”

That is a load of crap and aren’t we lucky to be now represented in NoVa by such anti-business / pro-labor member of the HofR. Union growth was stifled by Unions killing off the industries they dominate, i.e. Northern US based auto plants, as we are now seeing.

Over the last decade, union growth has come from teaching and civil service unions and they are now doing the same to those organizations. Charter schools, merit based pay and vouchers continue to demonstrate improved educational benefits but are resisted by teacher unions. The number of state and local governmental employees have skyrocketed but I would be happy to compare efficiency levels to comparable private sector service organizations. There is a reason (financially beneficial and operationally efficient) why DoD has outsourced so much work to the private sector.

So please don’t forget to write Santa (or even better your Senator and Congressman) today and ask him not to deliver the present of card checking legislation to the Labor Unions.

What do you think?