Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Sixty years after Taft-Hartley helped destroy the momentum of the labor movement, the newly Democratic Congress is on the verge of passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow unionization of a workplace if a majority of workers signed a card indicating their desire for a union.

Why now?

Are Democrats finally aware that without unions, their party (to say nothing of the country) would crumble? Have our politicians noticed, as they drive from mansions to the Capitol's underground parking garage, that the United States middle class is disappearing?

Has all this forced the allegedly liberal wing of our establishment to risk helping gain working people some power?

Or are they just secure in paying back the campaign work and donations of labor unions with a bill that is certain to be vetoed by the illegitimate president Bush?

There's one more option. This supposedly pro-labor law is really pro-establishment. Card-check elections would give existing unions power more than anything else. Many places that can win card-check elections will likely never win a contract. (I wonder if unions can collect dues in the meantime?)

Repealing Taft-Hartley's ban on the so-called secondary boycott would permit again worker solidarity and result in true labor power. What Taft-Hartley termed secondary boycotts are really solidarity strikes that were crucial to the booming labor organizing of the 1930s and 1940s.

Allowing supervisors to join unions – managers were on the verge of being unionized when Taft-Hartley was passed and such unionizing was made illegal – would also allow labor solidarity, instead of enforcing by law an alliance of supervisory workers with owners. This is especially pertinent with recent NLRB decisions declaring that nurses with even marginal supervisory responsibilities will have to be excluded from unions that they are already in.

Compared to removing restrictions on who can be in a union or on secondary boycotts, card-check elections increase union power rather than worker power.

Even if this gesture becomes law, we as workers are still at the point where if we want to do true labor organizing we will have to do it outside of labor law.