Is 1930’s Nostalgia Really The Best Way To Sell “Card Check?”
Andy Stern
Some in the labor movement are sensing nostalgia for a distant decade as they try to combat a concerted business push to derail the Employee Free Choice Act, a.ka. “card check.”
“We’re looking to restore the law the way it was in 1935,” Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern said in a recent meeting with reporters, referring to the current card-check debate.
Did any of SEIU’s lobbyists or PR people take a survey about how the public thinks about 1935? Most of us think of 1935 as one of those grim years of the 1930s before the Great Depression ended. And if Stern is saying labor law went to hell after 1935, he’s overlooking the fact that labor’s glory days were, by most estimations, in the 1950s — despite labor’s bugaboo, Taft-Hartley.
Another way to argue for card check that doesn’t seem too bright is to argue that black is white:
But James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, said “unionization and competitiveness are not incompatible.” He cited the aerospace and oil industries as examples where the two coexist. “You can’t say the decline of the auto industry is due to the strength of the UAW,” he added.
