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The Case for More Union Power Economic arguments against the EFCA don’t hold water.
By Liza Featherstone
Posted Friday, April 3, 2009 - 10:46am
It was surreal, last month, to see Citigroup organizing the business community against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to join unions by forcing employers to recognize a union after a majority of workers have signed cards. Here is a company whose CEO, Vikram Pandit, still has a job despite repeated failures and rakes in $11 million a year running a company that has received $45 billion in handout (sorry, bailout) checks from the taxpayers. Yet Citigroup was hoping to keep millions of low-wage workers from organizing to achieve a tiny fraction of the job security and compensation that its leaders now enjoy at taxpayers' expense. With enemies like this in the public-image battle, it might seem that EFCA barely needed friends. Yet despite the populist fervor in the land, anxiety about the economy is giving the bill's opponents more traction than they might otherwise inspire.
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