Catastrophe - Dick Morris [58]
The arbitration provision essentially puts the government right in the middle of the formulation of the contract—an inappropriate position. After all, it’s not the government, but the company and the workers, who will have to live with the outcome.
The obituaries of failed American businesses attest to how often union demands have forced companies to close their doors, laying off all their workers. With low-cost foreign labor so readily available and few barriers standing in the way of foreign trade, American workers need to remember that moving labor offshore is an increasingly attractive alternative for many businesses. For an arbitrator to impose a deal, without giving the boss a chance to tell the union that he’ll shut down if the terms aren’t altered, is self-defeating for the workers involved.
ACTION AGENDA
When he was a Republican, Pennsylvania’s senator Arlen Specter announced he was going to vote against card-check, saying that “the problems of the recession make this a particularly bad time to enact” the bill.196 His statement seemed to doom the legislation since it would give the Republicans (who are united in opposition) enough votes to sustain a filibuster. But now that Specter is a Democrat, there’s no way of knowing if he will succumb to pressure from Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “Senator Specter said he would reconsider the bill if other efforts to amend the National Labor Relations Act to increase labor’s clout are unsuccessful.”197 The Journal noted that “one change [Specter] supports is shortening the time frame in which union elections are held.”198 There is also speculation that Specter would back the requirement that an arbitrator be named if collective bargaining should fail to produce a union contract.
And, of course, now that Specter is serving a new master, all bets may be off.
The unions, of course, won’t take the legislation’s defeat lying down. This bill is their top priority for the Obama administration—the key to their future success—and they won’t take no for an answer.
And labor has the clout to make its feelings known in the Democratic Party—because Democrats are increasingly dependent on union donations to support their campaigns.
We need to put maximum pressure on the moderate Democratic senators to kill this dangerous bill.
MUZZLING TALK RADIO
In our book Fleeced, published in June 2008, we warned that “there may be a more devilish and fiendish plot afoot to cripple talk radio than the simple reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine.”199
Unfortunately, we were right. The liberals, led by Obama, are intent on killing talk radio. But they are too clever to use the Fairness Doctrine to do so. Instead, as we predicted, they’re using the basic Federal Communications Commission (FCC) law to demand “diversity,” “localism,” and “public interest” programming in radio.
“Diversity” comes in through an amendment to the FCC statute introduced by assistant Senate majority leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), which passed the Senate on a party-line vote and is pending in the House. Durbin’s amendment would require the FCC to “take actions to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest.”200
Durbin defines “diversity” as relating “primarily to gender, race, and other characteristics…in media ownership.”201 But Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma may have a more accurate description: “I certainly can’t tell you what ‘diversity in communication media ownership’ means. Federal agencies love this kind of language [in a statute] because it gives them greater leeway to interpret it however they like and impose their will upon the industry they regulate.”202
In the hands of an FCC whose majority is Democratic, it could well give the agency a lever to oust conservative owners and reissue the broadcast license to a more “diverse” set. (There are two members of the