Major Setback

They've taken card check out of the card check bill.

Unions have been trying to level the organizing playing field for some time. You would think with a new worker-friendly administration, this would not have been so hard. But the truth is that we really only have corporate-friendly administrations and slightly less corporate-friendly administrations.

The rhetoric you will hear about "card check", formally known as the Employee Free Choice Act, is that it reduces democracy by eliminating the secret ballot in a work-place vote on whether to get a union or not. The truth is that those votes are about as democratic as an election in someplace like Sudan. The employers spend an inordinate amount of time pressuring and intimidating their workers into voting against the union. Card check allows a union to be formed once a certain number of workers sign cards saying they want one. The bill doesn't ban secret ballot vote; it just add another option. As far as I'm concerned, more options means more democracy.

This is disappointing and a major indication that a "Democratic" majority doesn't mean a whole lot if a significant number of those "Democrats" aren't going to support workers.