I asked U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln about the union card check bill. If it passes, employees will be authorized to align their work force with a union if more than half simply sign cards. The boss could show up at the office one day and find a stack of cards on his desk and a fully authorized collective bargaining agent in his office.

I was talking to Lincoln because she’s a bit on the spot, a circumstance to which we’ll return after exploring the issue.

Under current law, a third of a work force must sign a card of unionizing intent, then, after 40 days, the National Labor Relations Board comes in and supervises a secret-ballot election.

Unions want this easier method of preemptive signature imposition so they can more easily expand memberships and, they contend, champion the newly forgotten working man in this free-trade, off-shore, corporate-coddling, Bush-damaged world.

Management fears this change. It believes unions and working peers could lean on people to get unions formed merely by unthinking signatures and that management would have no time or chance, as it is now permitted, to counter union rhetoric. Management believes this period of economic uncertainty and heightened foreign competition based on cheap labor is no time for America to start facilitating contentious unions that would breed like rabbits into new sectors, such as the service industry.

President-elect Barack Obama and the Democrats are beholden for their recent electoral sweep to organized labor’s money and efforts, especially in Ohio and the upper Midwest. Labor wants to be rewarded with card check. It’s no more complicated than that.

Democrats will be close to a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, by which they could break through Republican stalls and actually get things passed. But, most likely, they’ll have to pick up one or two Republicans and hold all Democrats, which is where Lincoln comes in on this issue.

She’d surely like to oblige her Democratic colleagues at the very outset on a vital political payoff to unions. But she happens to come from an odd and remote little state with an anemic labor movement, a right-to-work law and a recent election record of delivering darned near two in three votes not to Barack Obama, but John McCain.

And she’s on the ballot for re-election in two years. While Arkansas Republicans don’t have an evident farm club or potent candidate, there’s always the growing redness of our presidential voting to contend with. And there’s no law that says Mike Huckabee couldn’t run against Lincoln.

Here’s the thing about Blanche Lincoln: She tends to ramble and speak in seemingly banal platitudes. Some people dismiss her wordy and seemingly superficial rhetoric as evidence of her intellectual limitation. But on this issue, and probably others, her verbal meandering actually make sense once you distill it.

She said the issue was figuring out what management and labor really want and need. If it’s a better business environment for employers and a better quality of life for workers, then, she said, both sides would be better served if the new Obama administration and Congress would start out next year focusing not on card check.

The more appropriate focus, she said, would be reforming and expanding health insurance and reforming some of our energy policies and habits to save resources and money for everyone. The time is magically right for that, she said.

You’re thinking that’s pure political evasion, a smokescreen, an attempt to avoid the sticky point. It’s all of that for sure. But it’s also exactly right.

This card check bill is mostly about unions trying to further unions. Management’s opposing interest is mostly reflexive and myopic.

More efficient and more expansive health insurance, cheaper and less wasteful energy practices, a stimulus to our imperiled economy – all of that is more important to the quality and standard of our lives, whether we are employers or employees, than whether workers can form a union in a day or 40 and on a signature or with a private ballot.

Alas, Lincoln is still going to have to vote one way or the other on card check, or at least on whether to end a filibuster. National Democrats will be watching. Her local chambers of commerce will be, too.



——-

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.