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Do Pennsylvanians really oppose EFCA?

In a story yesterday on pa2010.com, Susquehanna Polling & Research is said to be reporting that 55 percent of Pennsylvanians are opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act, with a full 40 percent said to be “strongly” opposed.

Right.

The first thing you need to keep in mind here is that, as the story points out, Susquehanna Polling & Research is a Republican firm, and Republicans are nothing if not dead-set against giving employees the right to form unions. The next thing you should do is go and read the questions asked of respondents. Every one of the three questions posed about EFCA, or “card check” as the poll referred to it, expressly repeats, and indeed begins with, the often-claimed GOP lie that EFCA takes away employees’ right to a secret ballot.

EFCA does no such thing. If one-third of workers choose to hold a National Labor Relations Board election at their workplace, they retain the right to ask the federal government to do so. EFCA does not take away any workers’ rights; it gives them more by providing a second option for forming a union that does not involve the NLRB process that has been co-opted, twisted and manipulated by far too many employers looking to stop their workers from forming a union.

A secret-ballot election sounds great, until you realize that the system doesn’t work quite the way it sounds. Employers hold all the cards, controlling the flow of information, the ability of workers to meet and organize, and even their eventual ability to hold their secret-ballot vote. And along the way, they can continue to harass, intimidate and threaten termination to any employee trying to unionize. Seriously, if EFCA truly did take away workers’ rights, do you really think organizations representing working people would be wholeheartedly supporting it? Come on!

It’s not unions, Democrats, the AFL-CIO, or anyone else of that ilk trying to take away workers’ rights. It is, as always, Republicans and the corporate honchos they represent. Really, when is the last time you recall Republicans standing up for the working class?

This poll is completely meaningless, rendered so by the fact that it is, like so much coming out of the right side of the political and social aisle these days, predicated completely on lies.

We do need an accurate calibration of where Pennsylvanians stand on EFCA, and a realistic accounting to them of exactly what this bill does and doesn’t do. Pennsylvanians, and all Americans, have been lied to, misled, and taken for a ride long enough. We need, and should want, the truth.

This poll is certainly not it.

June 10, 2009 at 9:49 am

--Tammy Alonso

Tags: Card Check

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