The take no prisoners EFCA campaign

The unions are pushing hard for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. For the uninitiated it would allow employees to form a union simply by signing a card. When the majority of employees have signed the card the union is formed. Thing is, this eliminates the secret ballot because if you know who has signed the card you also know by extension who hasn't, leaving those people open for intimidation.

If that wasn't bad enough the unions are now lobbying for companies that take bailout money to be prohibited from lobbying against EFCA. Not only do these people want to eliminate the secret ballot, they also want to restrict free speech.

Whatever it takes to win, apparently.

Unions win, we lose

Greg Mankiw notes that President Obama has issued an order permitting federal agencies to require union labor for federal contracts. Now, let's review. Union workers get paid more than regular workers -- that's the whole point of starting a union.

Let's say you have have a budget of $15 million to cover the labor costs to build roads. Let's say that to build a mile of road requires 20 workers and 50 hours to complete. Now let's say that non-union workers are paid $20/hour while union workers make $30/hour. Thus, a mile of road using non-union labor would cost $20,000/mile while union labor would cost $30,000/mile.

Thus for the same $15 million budget you could get 750 miles of paved roads with non-union labor or 500 miles with union labor. Doing less with more, that's the union way.

Well, Obama certainly did promise change...

EFCA Ad

In some weird way I've actually been looking forward a bit to the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act because I was curious how its advocates would make the case for such an odious piece of legislation. Well, the picture is now coming into focus:

This is, in total, how the ad voiceover describes the legislation:

The Employee Free Choice Act will let workers choose to join a union and negotiate for better wages and benefits.

Except, you know, workers can already choose to join a union. The people pushing this legislation are so cowardly that they refuse to say what it even is, because if the public had any clue no one would support it.