Clearing up EFCA facts

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It’s amazing how quickly a catchphrase can start echoing through the media. Sometimes the source is popular culture: remember “Where’s the beef?” from the 1980s? Sometimes it’s a bit more insidious.

Right now, for example, what’s filtering through the Colorado media is the distorted talking point that proposed federal legislation dealing with organized labor, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), would eliminate the right of workers to hold a secret-ballot vote on organizing their workplaces.

Although the highest-profile opposition has come from conservative voices, the pros and cons of the EFCA have generated considerable debate on both ends of the political spectrum.


Factually misrepresented

However, what Colorado newspaper readers and radio listeners are being told about the EFCA by news and opinion sources factually misrepresents the legislation.

For an issue as serious as the EFCA, readers and listeners should demand serious media coverage and editorial discussion. They haven’t been getting it.

What they have been getting from some of the state’s largest newspapers and radio stations are assertions that the EFCA “would eliminate the secret ballot in union-organizing elections,” that it “takes away workers’ right for a private vote on unions,” or that it “effectively eliminates the secret ballot vote among workers when forming a union.”

The House Committee on Education and Labor has described the claim that “[t]he Employee Free Choice Act abolishes the National Labor Relations Board’s ‘secret ballot’ election process” as a “myth.” The committee states on its Web site: “The Employee Free Choice Act would make that choice — whether to use the NLRB election process or majority sign-up — a majority choice of the employees, not the employer.”

As The New York Times reported, “Business groups have attacked the legislation because it would take away employers’ right to insist on holding a secret-ballot election to determine whether workers favored unionization.”

That’s pretty clear, right? Apparently the word hasn’t reached some of the media in Colorado, where a variety of news reports and editorial comments have parroted the inaccurate claim that EFCA would strip workers of the right to a secret-ballot union organizing election.

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