Although CIS advocates the crackdown on illegal aliens through raids such as these, the report actually makes a persuasive case for the legalization of many currently undocumented immigrants –- what many anti-illegal immigration groups and their supporters call “amnesty.”

Among the findings of the report are that meatpacking workers work in difficult and dangerous conditions; workers have seen a 45 percent decline in their wages and standard of living since 1980; the meatpacking plants returned to full capacity within five months of the raid; and at the four facilities about which researchers were able to obtain information, wages and bonuses rose on average eight percent after the raid.

While CIS claims this supports the efficacy of workplace raids, Walter Ewing, senior researcher at the Immigration Policy Center, notes that the same data could just as easily be used to support a program for legalization of undocumented workers. It would also suggest the need for raising wages at the meatpacking plants – something that United Food and Commercial Workers was already trying to do before the plants were raided.

The CIS report has infuriated immigration advocacy organizations, who argue, as Ewing does in his post on Immigration Impact, that widespread workplace raids “would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, while wreaking havoc on the economy and tearing apart countless families and communities in the process.” Ewing cites a study from the Center for American Progress that estimates it would cost more than $200 billion over five years to apprehend, detain, and remove the approximately 10 million undocumented immigrants in the country. “This estimate does not include the economic costs which would be incurred by employers whose workforces are suddenly depleted and businesses whose customers suddenly disappear,” Ewing adds, “nor does it include the extraordinary human costs entailed in breaking up families that include more than three million native-born, U.S.-citizen children who have at least one undocumented parent.”

Still, the CIS report does suggest what many people suspect:  companies’ reliance on illegal immigrants to fill their workforces drives down wages and working conditions, since undocumented workers are the least likely to protest.

All in all, the most efficient solution, then, would seem to be a plan to provide many of the currently undocumented immigrants living and working in the country a path to legalization.

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.

Unions support the bill because it would make union organizing easier. Big business opposes the measure for the same reason. The stakes are high and business and labor are pouring money into TV ads, field organizers and lobbyists.

You might expect that venture capital firms like the Carlyle Group, capitalists that they are, would join with their brothers and sisters in big business to defeat pro-union legislation. But as Matt Cooper reports on TPMDC, that’s not how it’s playing out:

But the main voice of private equity firms in Washington, the Private Equity Council, has stayed out of the fight and the answer would seem to be owing to the fact that unions provide so much capital to private equity. In fact, the Private Equity Council’s own research shows in 2007 alone,” the top 20 public pension funds, representing nearly 10 million retirees in states including California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, had a collective private equity investment of nearly $140 billion.”

So there you have it. The private equity lobby has opted out of the fight because its interests pull in different directions. They don’t like unions, but they want union money. It’s strictly business. The Private Equity Council’s decision to sit this one out is a blow to the business coalition arrayed against the EFCA and could help tip the balance for the unions.

Economist Dean Baker of CEPR speaking at the National Press Club, Tuesday.

One in five union activists gets illegally fired in the run-up to unionization elections, economist Dean Baker said at an event held at the National Press Club, Tuesday. Baker’s estimate is based on data compiled by the National Labor Relations Board and analyzed by Baker’s colleagues at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) — a liberal economic policy think tank in Washington.

The statistic is central to the progressive case for the Employee Free Choice Act, proposed legislation that would allow workers to bypass formal unionization elections in favor of an informal signup process known as a card check. Big business lobby groups like the Chamber of Commerce oppose the EFCA because the law would make union organizing much easier. But instead of arguing that less unionization is better, EFCA opponents claim that card check is undemocratic because it could mean workers can unionize without a secret ballot.

Baker argues that his statistic suggests that mandatory elections for contested unionization drives stifle workers’ democratic right to organize.  According to Baker, employer harassment and retaliation are major and often under-recognized obstacles to unionization. He sees the EFCA as a way to equalize the power imbalance between labor and management so that workers can decide for themselves whether they want to organize.

A provision in the bill would allow workers to form a union without going through a formal National Labor Relations Board election. Instead, under a so-called card check system, workers sign cards to indicate that they want to unionize. If a majority signs up, the union is on its way to official recognition. Card check is already a legal way to form a union as long as the employer accepts the results and agrees to recognize the union. Often employers demand an NLRB election in the face of a card check majority to buy time to change workers’ minds.

Under the the NLRB election system, between the time an election is announced and the day of the vote, employees are vulnerable to coercion by management, Baker says. There’s a fundamental power imbalance: Bosses can fire organizers, but organizers can’t fire the bosses.

“There’s a tendency to dismiss [harassment, but] one in five organizers ends up getting fired, according to the NLRB,” Baker said on Tuesday.

In a follow-up email, Baker explained that the one in five figure came from CERP’s analysis of NLRB data, using an influential methodology developed by two scholars at the University of Chicago who used these methods to challenge claims of widespread intimidation of workers by management. The estimate uses data on the number of workers who were reinstated after the NLRB determined that they had been illegally fired. Just over half of all illegal terminations took place during a unionization drive. CEPR and the Chicago scholars assumed that only pro-union workers would be singled out for illegal termination during a union drive. We know how many pro-union workers there were in any given shop based on the published results of the election. The CEPR team further posited that organizers and activists, a small subset of overall workers, are more likely to be fired than less vocal pro-union workers. When the CEPR team crunched the numbers for 2005, they estimated that 15-20% of the union organizers involved in these drives were illegally terminated.

Baker argues that this level of risk is chilling unionization. Workers who want to be in a union are afraid to speak out, he says. The EFCA card check provision would protect workers’ ability to freely choose whether they want a union, he maintains.

Arguments like these are powerful ammunition for progressives in their impending fight over the EFCA. If NLRB elections are systematically plagued by intimidation and power imbalances between labor and management, it is difficult to argue that they are democratic.