The legislation passed March 1st, 2007 by the House called the “Employee Free Choice Act” is being celebrated as a victory for labor, a “reward” from the Democrats. Highlights of the bill include:

1. Allowing unions to form without using the secret ballot. The beauty of the secret ballot was that corporations steered (cajoled and/or threatened) employees away from forming a union. Disallowing the secret ballot would mean employees sign up to form a union by filling out cards. Once a majority of employees have filled out cards, the union could form. So this would make it a bit easier for that to happen.
2. Penalties corporations would receive for not being good partners in business-labor relationships would be increased.
3. Mediation and arbitration would be required under first contract negotiations. This would benefit workers against corporations who refuse to negotiate˜on the first contract.

So often we read e-mails from the unions and from our liberal friends that exclaim how great it is to have the Dems in control again so we can get “victories” like the Employee Free Choice Act. George Will wrote a column against it in which he fulminated about the theft of “free speech rights” from the corporations via enactment of this new law. Why is it never about workers’ rights under the 13th Amendment? Why are workers regulated by statute, the way gasoline additives are “regulated?” Why are we agreeing to fight on this battlefield…the one that says workers can only beg for crumbs, but can never demand on-the-job rights?

Part of the problem is rooted in the ascendency of “Rights of Property” over human rights. So-called “representatives,” including those who voted for this law, accept the premise that on “corporate property” workers have no Constitutional protections, but the “rights” of the corporation are absolute.

We have yet to embrace the notion that People are self-sovereign, and self-owning beings whose authority to act and decide and to be un-harassed in their rights, wherever they may be, supercedes any claimed corporate “Rights of Property.” Boards of Directors regularly hide behind a corporate charter and use it to trespass on the inalienable rights of workers, and the law of the land protects them, the way it once protected slave masters as they violated the human self-sovereignty of people that the law recognized to be “property,” not sovereign citizens.

Some celebrate laws like this too easily, too readily. Perhaps the People are so use to being mere widgets in the commerce clause defined rules of American governance that they can’t imagine a rights-defined system of self-government. Some celebrate lip service and window-dressing as though freedom on the job has been achieved. This isn’t sour grapes you’re reading. It’s a raisin in the sun. It’s not that the glass is half empty; it’s that we aren’t allowed to pour our own water. It’s not that this law is a “step in the right direction” that I wish had gone further — what makes me want to turn off the celebratory music is that it’s being played in a hall of mirrors where everybody is dancing around the real issue.

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF