Washington Post on Employee Free Choice Act

The Post has a generally unfavorable editorial on the pending Employee Free Choice Act. I do not think that the criticism is all that unreasonable but so much for the cabal of a "liberal press."

Organized labor's press to pass the Employee Free Choice Act is understandable. Union representation has fallen from 20 percent of the workforce in 1980 to 12 percent today; just over 7 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions. The ability of employees to organize -- indeed, even the prospect that they could do so -- is a critical component of achieving fairness in the workplace, and it is a core democratic right. Labor and its legislative allies would do better to concentrate on finding practical ways to protect it, rather than seeking a politically unachievable, and substantively unwise, result.