'Card-check' legislation

By obtaining only 51 of the 60 votes needed in the Senate on June 27 to stop a Republican filibuster, the Democratic leadership was unable to pass the “card-check” legislation that the House had passed in the spring.

This defeat for a pro-union bill is a setback for U.S. workers that will require a new round of struggle to reverse. It also throws additional light on the limitations of the ties between the Democratic Party and organized labor.

The “card-check” bill would demand that the National Labor Relations Board recognize a union once that union could show that more than 50 percent of the workers at a shop had signed cards asking for the union to represent them. Under the current reactionary anti-labor law, all that these cards win for the union is an election. If you read the propaganda from the Chambers of Commerce, bosses’ trade journals and any of the rightist press that support every thought of the National Association of Manufacturers on this, you will find a strident defense of the “secret ballot.” Such a union election and “secret ballot” at plants like the giant Smithfield hog slaughterhouse in North Carolina allow the bosses to fire workers who are the strongest union organizers, threaten to bring in the state against immigrant workers, bully and otherwise intimidate enough workers so that the union loses the election.

That’s why anyone who is pro-labor and who wants to see unorganized workers win their own union to defend their rights should be for “card-check.” It’s why all the bosses were and are against it and why George Bush threatened to veto it. It’s why every pro-business lobby in Washington—and that’s 99 percent of the lobbies—urged the Republicans to fight the bill and demanded that the Democrats not put up the kind of knock-down, drag-out fight that could turn the debate in the Senate to a popular mobilization.

Democrats—including the presidential candidates, seven of whom supported the bill—present themselves as “friends of labor,” but they all want contributions from business. Remember that Democrats passed the anti-labor NAFTA trade act during the Bill Clinton administration. They only passed a modest increase in the minimum wage this year by tying it to the reactionary bill funding the occupation of Iraq.

It’s apparent that to pass “card-check” rules, organized labor will need more than “friends” in Congress; it will need a popular mobilization.