By THOMAS HARTLEY
Business First

The "Employee Free Choice Act" is the name tag on an amendment currently stuck halfway through Congress.

But some opponents suggest that a more accurate name would be "Employee Take Away Rights Act."

Like so many issues wrapped up in politics, the bill, passed in 2007 in the House to amend the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, generates passion on both sides - employers on one and unions on the other.

In general, the proposed legislation would speed up and simplify the process by which unions can become the exclusive certified bargaining agent for employees who have had no labor contract with their employer.

That aspect makes it appealing to labor unions such as the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers, which is reaching outside the auto industry to recruit members.

Organized labor would like to compress the time between the card-check - when employees sign cards expressing interest in being represented by the union conducting the drive - and when the National Labor Relations Board certifies the union as bargaining agent.

Richard Lipsitz Jr., business agent for Teamsters Local 264, claims that in the several weeks that now lapse between the card-check and election, employers with money, lawyers and the advantage of time found in the last 10 to 20 years many ways to delay the process to the point where the union is decertified and the employer withdraws recognition.

At a time when overall union membership in the nation is down, unions are anxious for every opportunity to build it back up.

Under current labor law, the National Labor Relations Board will certify a union as exclusive bargaining representative for employees if it is elected either by a majority signature drive - the card-check process - or by secret ballot in an NLRB-conducted election, if more than 30 percent of employees sign statements supporting the union.

If the House version is enacted, the NLRB would be required to certify a bargaining agent without an election if a majority of employees signed cards requesting the union.

Lipsitz, who also is political-action coordinator for Teamsters Joint Council 46, said the change could cut in half the time between the card-check and the start of negotiations for an initial contract.

Edward McGowan, area director for UAW Region 9, based in Amherst, said getting contract talks going sooner would cut down the time in which employers can apply pressure on employees.

"From our experience, that includes terminating union supporters, especially in the industrial workplace. Employers are the source of paychecks, so they have economic power over their captive audience to vote no on a union," McGowan said.

Employers say speeding up the process of certifying a union as bargaining agent would have an unwanted side effect: It could do away with most organizing elections where employees cast secret ballots for or against union representation.

Joseph Braccio, an attorney with the Buffalo firm Hodgon Russ LLP, said that doing away with the secret ballot removes an organizing election's chief benefit - the anonymity of those voting.

Substituting the open card-signing process for the secret ballot could force employees to feel undue pressure from employers or other employees.

Braccio, who focuses on labor relations and employment law for private-sector employers, said that streamlining the National Labor Relations Act also could weaken the collective-bargaining method of writing a new contract and even the age-old right of unions to strike.

Under the Employee Free Choice Act, if both sides can't reach a labor contract within a specified time, an arbitrator will step in and dictate a binding two-year agreement.

"I do tons of collective bargaining, and in the process I might agree to something that I don't really like in exchange for something I do want," Braccio said.

"But if an arbitrator imposes a contract, it might potentially leave neither party happy. It could bind them to conditions that are onerous."

Lawyer Randall Odza of the Buffalo law firm Jaeckle Fleischmann & Mugel LLP, who also specializes in employer labor issues, said the proposed changes shape up as the biggest amendment to the National Labor Relations Act since the Taft-Hartley Act, the 1947 law that greatly restricts activities and the power of labor unions.

"My objection to signed cards taking the place of a secret ballot is philosophical," Odza said. "In this country, we developed a system for elections to be free of the potential for intimidation, undue influence or peer pressure. That is why we devised the secret-ballot election."

There's no guarantee what the Senate version of the Employee Free Choice Act will look like or when it will be introduced.

The Obama administration's preoccupation with stabilizing the economy, along with banking and the auto industry, may have pushed the effort to the back burner.

"I don't think President Obama wants to spend his political capital now, because he needs it for getting the economy back on track," Braccio said. "But when the economy recovers, I think it will come to the forefront again."