(Also posted on National Review Institute’s Media Malpractice blog.)
LA Times reporter Tom Hamburger has a very good article in Tuesday’s paper chronicling the business community’s largely behind-the scenes lobbying effort against the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act,” also known as the “card check” bill, which would largely do away with the secret ballot in unionization elections.
To Hamburger’s credit, he provides a lot of details about the business community’s lobbying effort that were not reported contemporaneously by the national media, such as an April meeting of 250 business owners in Arkansas that aimed to pressure Senators Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor in opposition to the card check legislation. Hamburger also reports about an “airlift” operation by pro-business groups that flew business owners to Washington for personal visits to their Senators’ offices.
However, Hamburger leaves unchallenged a questionable claim from an unnamed union advisor that unions have been “outspent” by business groups this year, and he gives the impression that unions have been largely sitting on their hands during this year’s debate:
“… once (Obama) was elected, labor leaders made a fateful decision … The labor groups scaled back (lobbying efforts on card check,) partly to give Obama time to get his bearings amid the deepening economic crisis…. Before labor groups had fully engaged this winter, the allied business groups successfully cast the legislation as undemocratic… The unions stepped up their pressure. On a frigid, blustery day in early April, 100 union members gathered outside Lincoln’s office in Little Rock and chanted for her to support the legislation.”
Those who have been fighting the card check bill over the past six months should be forgiven for wondering exactly when this supposed “scaled back” union lobbying period occurred, or when they weren’t “fully engaged” in the debate. Were unions giving Obama “time to get his bearings” on Jan. 14, when the union organization American Rights at Work announced a massive $3 million national TV ad campaign in support of card check?
Was it on Jan. 30, when the same group announced a “new television, print and online advertising campaign setting the record straight on the Employee Free Choice Act…?” Or maybe it was on Feb. 4, when labor unions brought hundreds of their members to a huge rally on Capitol Hill in support of the bill? In fact, a look at American Rights at Work’s news release web page shows a steady stream of announcements touting one ad campaign after another on the issue.
Is it likely that more strategic and effective grassroots lobbying by the pro-business community has helped give card-check opponents the upper hand, at least for now? Yes. But have labor unions been dramatically outspent or not “fully engaged” this year? Not by a long shot.
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