It’s a moderate’s world on Capitol Hill right now, and the latest evidence arrived yesterday when the Democratic sponsors of a controversial labor-friendly proposal dropped the bill’s central tenet: A provision allowing unions to organize by getting a simple majority of workers to sign cards in support. Under current law, workers organize unions by secret ballot. The Democrats’ proposal would have given workers the additional option of a public ballot, making it easier to unionize.

The so-called “card check” bill — supported by President Obama — has been labor’s biggest legislative priority this year, prompting a fierce battle with business groups that have spent bill millions to kill the measure. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) have come out squarely in opposition to the bill, making the party’s 60-member majority irrelevant. Yesterday, those moderates won an enormous concession with the removal of the card-check provision. From The New York Times:

In its place, several Senate and labor officials said, the revised bill would require shorter unionization campaigns and faster elections.

While disappointed with the failure of card check, union leaders argued this would still be an important victory because it would give companies less time to press workers to vote against unionizing.

The move might have changed the support dynamics on Capitol Hill, but it hasn’t changed the lobbying dynamics. Indeed, labor groups are still supporting the underlying bill — the Employee Free Choice Act — while many businesses are still opposing it. The Workforce Fairness Institute, a business group formed to fight EFCA, just shot out an email announcing its continued opposition based on language that forces government arbitration when workers and employers can’t agree on a union contract.

“The most damaging aspect of the bill — the binding arbitration provision, will remain intact,” the group rued.

With Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) suffering poor health, there’s no guarantee that even the diluted proposal can win 60 Senate votes.

But it still doesn’t explain why the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, after promising to crack down on employers who illegally hire immigrants and treat them as slave labor, is going after a company that starts its low-skilled workers at $10 – $12 an hour plus health benefits — far above the legal minimum wage. The government hasn’t even alleged that the company knowingly hired undocumented workers, only that an audit of its records shows that about a third of the workers might not be legal and may have shown fake documents when they were hired.

If the workers can’t now prove legal employment status, they’ll be fired and possibly deported.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) encouraged the DHS to be “tough” on employers who hire illegal immigrants. But he seems ill-informed about just who those employers are and what they’re doing.

“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” he told Julia Preston of the Times. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”

But it turns out American Apparel is not profiteering off illegal immigrants — just the opposite. It seems to be paying a fair and living wage and benefits to whoever comes to work there and can show proof of legal work authorization.

Technically, DHS can go after any employer it wants who may have hired someone with false papers. But targeting a model company providing low-skilled and immigrant workers a chance to earn an honest living wage doesn’t really seem to be the best use of scarce resources.

The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise. Yet if this is the goal, surely there are better ways to allocate $60bn than to buy GM? The funds would be better spent helping the Midwest diversify away from cars. Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.

But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it. A strong constituency wants to preserve jobs and communities as they are, regardless of the public cost. Another equally powerful group wants to let markets work their will, regardless of the short-term social costs. Polls show most Americans are against bailing out GM, but if their own jobs were at stake I am sure they would have a different view.

So the Obama administration is, in effect, paying $60bn to buy off both constituencies. It is telling the first group that jobs and communities dependent on GM will be better preserved because of the bail-out, and the second that taxpayers and creditors will be rewarded by it. But it is not telling anyone the complete truth: GM will disappear, eventually. The bail-out is designed to give the economy time to reduce the social costs of the blow.

Beyond GM, an even bigger worry should be the continuing long loss of well-paying, middle-class jobs that once allowed significant numbers of Americans to share in the country’s prosperity, Reich said. The government bailout of GM, he wrote, will do little to address that problem — in fact, it will only worsen as the automaker cuts jobs to stay afloat for as long as possible. In this new economy, GM’s old adage has been turned upside down, according to Reich. What’s bad for GM these days is what’s bad for America as well.

In March, a local chapter of the Laborers International Union of North America filed labor charges against Smithfield in Virginia, claiming the company has refused to bargain with the union as the company plans to close down one of its hometown plants and transfer some workers to other sites. LIUNA filed more charges in April.

This is hardly the first time Smithfield has had labor conflicts.  In 2007, unions charged that Smithfield collaborated with immigration authorities who led an immigration raid at its huge North Carolina pork-packing plant. Union officials said Smithfield was trying to discourage its workers from organizing.

Still, nothing tops this 2006 Rolling Stone story about Smithfield, which claims that “America’s top pork producer churns out a sea of waste that has destroyed rivers, killed millions of fish and generated one of the largest fines in EPA history.”

As Rolling Stone put it: “Welcome to the dark side of the other white meat.”

If the suspicions about Smithfield’s pig waste being the source of the swine flu pandemic pan out, the company’s reputation may soon get even darker.

The bill, which would allow employees to form a union if they can gather signatures from a majority of workers, rather than being required also to hold a formal election weeks after collecting the signed cards, is virulently opposed by business groups, who fear they’ll lose the ability to sway workers against the union option. (The law would also increase penalties against employers who mistreat workers for trying to unionize.)

According to OpenSecrets, “Business [Political Action Committees] not only gave nearly five times more in campaign contributions than labor PACs did in the last election cycle ($365.1 million versus $77.9 million, including contributions to leadership PACs) they are backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $144.4 million on lobbying efforts in the 2007-2008 election cycle, or more than $400,000 for every day Congress was in session. By contrast, the entire labor sector spent less than $84 million on lobbying efforts during those two years.”

All that lobbying by big business has certainly won the support of some Republicans, who have conveniently misrepresented the bill as “taking away the secret ballot” from employees — as opposed to offering them another, far simpler option for how to form a union.

For example, at a fundraising stop Monday in his home state, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said that “jobs are being exported. We have problems with pensions and health care. To take away the secret ballot is big stuff. I’m listening to all of the viewpoints very carefully. I have a hunch we’ll vote this spring.”

And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called it “a threat to one of the fundamentals of democracy.”

Meanwhile, some Democrats who’ve supported the bill in the past aren’t signing onto it now. Even key Senate Democrats are wavering in their support, The Wall Street Journal reports.

That’s likely because it’s so easy to distort what the bill says, and why. As Rachel Maddow explained on her MSNBC show the other night, in the most coherent and straightforward discussion I’ve heard yet of this bill, the purpose of the Employee Free Choice Act is to allow employees to form a union without having to endure weeks of intimidation by their bosses. The “card check” option, as it’s called, means employees can just sign a card to vote for the union, if they want to do that. (As Maddow explains, contrary to the Republicans’ claims, the law explicitly allows them to have a secret ballot, too, if they want one.)

Employees might want to go with the card check because traditionally, after the cards are signed, an employer gets several weeks in which it can campaign against the union, often by intimidating employees who might want to sign up. As a former labor lawyer and a former employee at a company where some of us signed cards to form a union, I can attest that the boss immediately starts sending letters and emails to employees listing all the terrifying things that are likely to happen when they join — including that they could all be fired. Since employees are a captive audience to the boss, they get to hear lots and lots of this reasoning.  And eventually, many are too scared to vote for the union, despite that sacred secret ballot.

The Employee Free Choice Act tries to swing the pendulum back a bit, so employees can make a choice without intimidation. Card check has long been an option under the National Labor Relations Act, but the law gave employers the right to veto it, and increasingly, that’s just what they’ve done.

For a more thorough explanation, including how the labor law actually applies to a unionizing battle at a Rite Aid in Lancaster, Calif., check out this story on Truthout from David Bacon.

“Although its collapse has dominated recent media coverage, the financial sector is not the only segment of the U.S. economy running into serious trouble. The institutions that govern the labor market have also failed, producing the unusual and unhealthy situation in which hourly compensation for American workers has stagnated even as their productivity soared.

EFCA, which would allow workers to unionize without a secret ballot,  “is not a panacea,” the signatories say, “but it would restore some balance to our labor markets.”

Among the supporters are several economists better known for their neoclassical “free trade” convictions than defending unions — including Laura Tyson, a former adviser to President Clinton who sits on the boards of Morgan Stanley and ATT, and Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University professor and former adviser to the World Trade Organization.

The Nobel Prize-winning economists checking in for labor are Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow, emeritus professors at Stanford and MIT respectively. Their support for unionization reflects an emerging viewpoint among many economists that a successful global free trade regime depends on the growth of strong social safety nets.

South Carolina State Rep. Eric Bedingfield (R) won a second term in November, on the same day Barack Obama won the presidential race and Democrats took the largest congressional majorities in a generation. Within weeks, Bedingfield came up with a way to challenge the Democratic agenda right out of Charleston. He drafted a bill that, if passed by two-thirds of the state House and Senate, would place a measure on the 2010 ballot to invalidate any attempt by labor organizers to make unionizing possible without a secret ballot vote.

“Other members have introduced this bill in the past,” Bedingfield said on Thursday. “It hasn’t gotten the two-thirds vote. What’s changed is that there’s never been a concerted effort like this.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Bedingfield is a member of the Save Our Secret Ballot coalition, an alliance of businesses, conservative think tanks, and local politicians united in the goal of passing state ballot initiatives that prohibit any kind of elections held without secret ballots-and thereby, the thinking goes, nullifying the Employee Free Choice Act before Democrats in Congress can pass it. As it was written by the last Congress in 2007, EFCA would allow unions to be certified by the National Labor Relations Board if a majority of workers sign cards designating the union as their bargaining representative. Union elections would not be banned, but they would no longer be required. Union activists and anti-labor groups alike believe that the new rules would make it easier to organize.

Members of the coalition believe they’ve found the best strategy for stopping the proposed law in its tracks. They are running up against another, better-funded group of anti-EFCA campaigners who consider a state-by-state campaign a waste of time. Still other opponents of EFCA think that the battle was already lost in the 2008 elections, when the Democrats won their increased majorities. While all of the bill’s opponents are bolstered by polling that show 70 percent or more of Americans opposing EFCA if they see it as “eliminating the secret ballot,” the disagreement over strategy is hurting them in the most critical labor battle in decades. While opposition to EFCA will be well-funded, this division, and the size of the Democrats’ majorities in Congress, are making life difficult for the anti-labor side of the debate.

“This is basically about a 40-year struggle to bring the social democratic model to America,” said Linda Chavez, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and President George W. Bush’s first nominee for Secretary of Labor, on Thursday. “Unfortunately, I think it’s going to succeed. Having 58 or 59 Senate seats, instead of 55 seats-that makes a big difference.”

Many Washington-based activists are more hopeful than Chavez. There is little doubt that EFCA will pass the House of Representatives – in 2007, the bill picked up 15 Republican voters there. There are rumors that Blue Dog Democrats might ask for the Senate to act before the House does on EFCA, which would be fine for most activists, as that’s where they’ve focused their attentions. One insider at an anti-EFCA campaign identified four Democratic senators who could be cajoled to oppose the bill-Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mark Warner of Virginia, and newly-appointed Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet.

In targeting these senators, the Washington-based anti-EFCA coalition is continuing a strategy that began during the 2008 election. In July, Peter Stone of National Journal reported that more than $100 million would be spent between multiple political action committees (and the Chamber of Commerce) to defeat Democratic Senate candidates who supported EFCA. The Employee Freedom Action Committee, a political outgrowth of Rick Berman’s Center for Union Facts, spent millions of dollars to fund ads and staffers who hounded candidates such as Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) about EFCA.

Almost all of the Democrats targeted in these campaigns won their elections. The economic crisis played a decisive role, not merely by driving Republicans down in the polls, but by erasing assets of the people who had been funding anti-EFCA campaigns. Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas billionaire who had given $30 million to the Freedom’s Watch PAC and had called EFCA a “fundamental threat” to society, lost an eventual $24 billion of his net worth in the crash.

The sinking fortunes of funders like Adelson caused anti-EFCA campaigners to scale back at a critical time. Now, some worry about the effort to run ballot initiative campaigns in states for the lack of funds. “The business community has a very big appetite for the campaign against EFCA,” said one campaign insider. “It’s also very hungry, and the cupboard is bare. They have no money. Everyone is trying to raise money.”

“The very existence of efforts in the states is healthy,” said Ernie Istook, the chairman of the coalition’s advisory board, on Wednesday. Istook, a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said that he’d received positive feedback from his friends in Congress because the ballot initiatives, by attracting local media, “are helping to educate the public and open up new fronts. Our goal is not simply to win a one-time fight in Congress, because bills can be re-filed in the next session. Our goal is to enact provisions that kill the idea.”

Some anti-EFCA campaigners in Washington disagree with this, and point out that the states where ballot initiatives have been launched do not contain swing senators who could cast the deciding votes in a 2009 or 2010 EFCA fight. Rep. Bedingfield’s South Carolina has two Republican senators, whose opposition has never been in question.

While Bedingfield says that his effort can be “a tool to tell businesses to come to South Carolina,” it doesn’t calm Washington’s anti-EFCA campaigners. The proposed language in South Carolina and the 10 other states read, in part, “Where state or federal law requires elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation, the right of individuals to vote by secret ballot shall be guaranteed.” Some campaigners argue that a pre-emptive law like this won’t work; if it could, it would have been tried already.

Clint Bolick, a fellow at Arizona’s free-market Goldwater Institute and the principal legal adviser for the coalition, disagrees. “I didn’t hear anyone talking about this idea until very recently,” Bolick said. “It’s happening now because the threat is more significant. Even if the folks in D.C. are successful at derailing EFCA this time, we’re likely to have an even more Democratic senate in two years. It’s essential that we create some thunder at the grass roots.”

“We’ve got many of the same donors as [the Washington campaigners],” Bolick continued. “I don’t perceive any shorting of funding.”

In a legal memo that Bolick wrote for the coalition, he acknowledges that if anti-EFCA ballot measures pass after the president signs the bill, it will be difficult to defend the new lines in state constitutions. “Federal preemption law will present a significant challenge to state constitutional protections of the right to secret ballot,” Bolick wrote, “but ultimately, the interests served by such provisions should prevail.” That is exactly why some Washington activists oppose the state-focused campaign, and why labor attorneys contacted by TWI are not overly worried about it.

That won’t dissuade Bolick and the other members of the coalition from focusing their attention in states, ignoring the Senate, and trying to build a populist movement against EFCA. “You don’t get rid of your relief pitcher because you’ve lost your starter.”

Republicans are asking about Solis’ role as treasurer for American Rights at Work, the pro-union group that’s currently on the Hill pushing for the Employee Free Choice Act. The most daring strategy against Solis that I heard floated (not from a Hill Republican, but from a conservative activist) was to focus attention on her by filing a complaint against her with the House Ethics Committee. What would be the charge? Either that she participated in lobbying by being a leader with ARW, or that she erred by originally not mentioning this job in her disclosure documents.

Two reasons this might not work: Solis’ role in ARW was well-known and ceremonial (it’s on their Website), and no congressman has hinted that he/she would file a complaint that could make a splash but be deemed frivolous and politically motivated. Still, I heard some hope that “one of the ‘wingers” might ante up.

Sam Stein reports in The Huffington Post:

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.

Participants on the October 17 call — including at least one representative from another bailout recipient, AIG — were urged to persuade their clients to send “large contributions” to groups working against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), as well as to vulnerable Senate Republicans, who could help block passage of the bill.

Talk about chutzpah. Imagine you’re an AIG customer. How would you feel if AIG hit you up for money to fight some labor law?  It turns out that the U.S. taxpayer is in a similar position. Having recently hit the U.S. taxpayer up for billions of dollars, AIG turned its attention to politicking, not insurance.

Separately, good government groups are calling for a congressional investigation to find out whether bailout money ended up in the coffers of any political organizations.