So - organized labor in the form of the Change to Win coalition and the AFL-CIO spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several cycles, devoted hundreds of thousands of person-hours, extended itself in myriad ways - to bring Democrats to power, to elect a Democratic president, to elect a labor friendly slate that would finally break down the governmental and economic barriers to allow the labor movement to breathe and expand. Central to all of this is one piece of legislation, ingeniously titled the " Employee Free Choice Act," EFCA, or, card check. This column is fixated with EFCA because labor remains the backbone of the Democratic Party, EFCA is their top priority, and because the passage of card check legislation has the potential to dramatically reinvigorate the labor movement everywhere. Failure would probably doom it.
Conventional wisdom is that Democrats will pass card check upon assuming office, that Obama will pass it, and that all this will happen quite quickly. They'll anger business groups by doing so, but the quicker they get this out of the way, the more time they'll have to repair relations before the 2010 midterms. But card check is going to be one of the toughest pieces of legislation to pass.
First, it's not clear that Democrats have the votes to avoid a filibuster. A couple of Democratic senators, like Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, may balk. Business-funded groups are slamming Democrats in competitive states with pressure advertising, and anti-labor forces claim the support of virtually every major technology and industry association in Washington. Republicans like George Voinovich of Ohio and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania going to need an incentive -- positive or negative, depending on the case - to break ranks.
And nothing would be more disastrous for labor - and for the Obama administration - for Democrats to bring the vote to the floor and watch it fail. The history of the relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions is not as clear cut as modern political rhetoric might indicate. Two of the most consequential labor policy failures occurred during Democratic administrations and in Democratic congresses. Jimmy Carter and the Democrats failed to pass legislation legalizing common situs picketing, which would have made it much easier for unions to strike an entire job site if only one party had a contractual grievance. Congressional Democrats, stymied by dissenters in their own party, couldn't pass labor law reform out of committee. Bill Clinton sided with labor in most disputes, but NAFTA and fast track trade negotiation legislation are regarded by many in labor as the two biggest catalysts to the recent globalization-related declines in union membership.
To say that an older generations of labor leaders is wary of big promises from Democrats is an understatement. Indeed, within the movement, there's an implicit bargain at hand. If Obama doesn't get to sign EFCA, he's not going to lose the support of service-oriented unions, the multi-ethnic, racially diverse unions. In 1994, union members stayed home or voted for Republicans in part because they were angry that Clinton had pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement upon them.
It would be difficult for Obama to retain the ironclad support of Midwestern industrial unions - leaders of which took risks among their culturally conservative members by supporting Obama so unequivocally. Obama is likely to bide time with labor by appointing friendly folks to the National Labor Relations Board, by reigning in government outsourcing and by ordering the Justice Department the Labor Department to more stringently enforce existing protections for workers.
So -- maybe -- EFCA will have to wait until the summer of 2010, after the primaries, when Republicans in Ohio and Pennsylvania will be more vulnerable to pressure from unions. In the meantime, the unions have to figure out a way to be patient, and Obama's team has to figure out exactly how many votes in the Senate they have. If they've got a hard count of more than 60, then everything I've written above is moot.
But Senate sources aren't sure if the votes are there. If EFCA fails, there will be "blood on the floor," a leading labor political strategist predicted. That's one reason why the best politician in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, is the chief head-counter, working closely with Rep. George Miller in the House.
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