The real threat of Card Check: Government-forced contracts
The Employee Free Choice Act includes a Card Check section to eliminate the secret ballot in union organization elections. The outcry against this antidemocratic process may result in its removal. But even with Card Check removed, the most insidious section of the bill will still remain.
Card Check’s third section, innocuously called “Facilitating Initial Collective Bargaining Agreements,” would go much further than simply “facilitating.” It would allow the government to impose a contract on many businesses and workers who would otherwise negotiate terms for themselves.
Businesses and workers would have only 120 days to negotiate and agree to possibly hundreds of pages of contract terms and conditions until one side could force the other to accept the two-year government-imposed contact. Card Check calls the process “arbitration,” but the procedure described in the bill is known as compulsory binding interest arbitration, which is quite different from the arbitration most people know.
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