The New York Times
Wednesday 20 June 2007
Washington - Senate Democratic leaders moved Tuesday to force a vote on organized labor's top legislative priority, a bill that would make it far easier to organize workers. But Republican leaders vowed to kill the measure, voicing confidence that they could defeat a motion cutting off debate and bringing it to a vote this week.
The bill, already approved by the House but facing the threat of a veto by the Bush administration, would give employees at a workplace the right to unionize as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so. Under current law, an employer can insist on a secret-ballot election, even after a majority sign.
Union leaders see enactment of the bill as the single most important step toward reversing labor's long-term loss of membership and might. Virtually all Democrats in Congress are backing the legislation, partly because they recognize that a stronger labor movement, providing campaign contributions and volunteers, could translate into a stronger Democratic Party.
Business groups have mounted a big fight against the bill, with one organization, the Center for Union Facts, spending $500,000 on newspaper and broadcast advertisements this week alone.
Though the bill has cleared the House, passage there was on a vote of only 241 to 185, far from veto-proof. And with Senate Democrats and the chamber's two independents holding just 51 seats, well short of the 60 votes needed to cut off debate, Republicans and their business allies are predicting that that they can prevent even an up-or-down vote on the measure.
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, filed a petition Tuesday night for a vote later in the week to prevent Republicans from blocking consideration of the bill. But Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, said: "The cloture petition will not succeed, and the bill will be pulled. That will be the end of that for two years."
Despite the prospect that the bill will stall in the Senate, A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials say they have pressed Democratic leaders to take it up in order to build momentum for the future, much in the way unions pushed for a minimum-wage increase for a decade until it was finally enacted this year.
John J. Sweeney, the federation's president, expressed confidence that the bill would fare better if a Democrat won the White House next year. "This is really about 2009," Mr. Sweeney said. "But it's important that we show the country that we have majority support."
Republicans have put labor on the defensive by asserting that majority sign-up is less fair than secret-ballot elections.
Don Stewart, a spokesman for the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, derided the bill's name, the Employee Free Choice Act, as "Orwellian," asserting that labor organizers sometimes intimidated workers into signing pro-union cards.
In vowing to squelch the bill, Mr. McConnell said, "We went to the secret ballot in this country almost 200 years ago because everyone believed that the only way to have a ballot that really counted was if somebody was not looking over your shoulder."
The bill's supporters note that federal labor officials have long accepted majority sign-ups as an alternative to elections. Indeed, the supporters argue that majority sign-ups are usually fairer than secret-ballot elections, maintaining that workers often feel intimidated by their employers during unionization drives and so are fearful of losing their jobs.
"All those folks who are talking about democracy," Mr. Sweeney said, "are really folks concerned with keeping the labor movement from growing and becoming stronger."
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