The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (originated as HR 413) is not a bill to improve public safety or to improve cooperation between employer and employee. The title is pure propagandic. The use of grossly misleading titles for proposed legislation is the rule in Washington, not the exception.
The purpose of this bill is to increase union membership among municipal employees in the police, fire and medical services groups. Here is what the American Spectator has to say about it.
The bill claims to be designed to foster public-safety employer-employee cooperation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, the bill’s sole aim is to grant union officials monopoly collective-bargaining control over all state and local public-safety workers, including police, firefighters and emergency medical service personnel who refuse to join, or who quit a union and want to deal with their employer on an individual basis. In short, this bill would deny public-safety workers freedom of contract.
The bill would not foster public-safety employer-employee cooperation, because union bargaining is inherently confrontational, not cooperative. This bill itself recognizes that fact by purporting to prohibit strikes. That prohibition means little. History shows that when unions are granted monopoly bargaining privileges in the public sector, strikes occur whether legal or not.
Most important, this bill abrogates each state’s existing and sovereign right to order the labor relations of its own and its local governments’ employees in accordance with its elected officials’ judgment as to that state’s public interests.
Card Check (EFCA) is not the only bill in Congress designed to increase the membership and power of labor unions.
Bob B
RANDOM THOTS 