Until this week, CEOs, union-busters, and conservative Republicans have actively opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, mainly because of a provision they call “card check.” But card check provides exactly what they’ve been saying they want since the National Mediation Board (NMB) decided Monday to permit airline and railroad workers to obtain collective bargaining rights through majority-rule elections. The anti-worker-rights groups contend election rights enjoyed by everyone else in a democracy should be denied workers. Instead, they want collective bargaining determinations made by the majority of all of those qualified to participate – a supermajority. So, clearly, since they’re so upset by the NMB decision to stop requiring supermajority for airline and railroad workers, they’d be happy if Congress now intervened and instituted it for all workers by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

In my professional life (such as it is) I am a 6 Sigma Black Belt. For those who don’t know (most of you probably) that is a process improvement project manager. One of the tenets of Six Sigma is that you have to design the process to meet the needs of the customer, whoever that is. It is simply summed up as starting with the end goal in mind. This is applicable and important when we are talking about politics as well.

In the middle of policy fights, it is easy to get narrowly focused on the minutiae of the policy itself, while losing sight of the overall goals. This is even more of a problem when one does not have an overall set of goals in the first place.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

As Congress takes up its work again this week I thought it might be a good time to take a step back and think about what we want America to look like in the future. This is not about short-term policy fights or goals, but what it is we are working towards in the ten to fifteen year time frame. Politics is about compromise, sometimes galling compromises which progress towards the overall goal. By knowing what each of our overall goals are, we can more easily determine if the compromises of today are actually worth having or must be resisted to the end.

The news here isn’t that the US Chamber wants to buy off economists to sabotage legislation. It’s that they got caught this time.

Somebody in the Republican Party thought it would be a great idea to send Joe the Plumber to Pennsylvania to rally against the Employee Free Choice Act. The pretend plumber faced audiences so hostile in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg that he skipped a rally in Philadelphia. This perfectly sums of the state of both Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes of fame, and the GOP.

Want to get an idea of the public support of the Employee Free Choice Act? Check this out.

Harold Meyerson makes the case for the only way to restore “mass prosperity” to America: the Employee Free Choice Act.

The House Republicans just don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. In a press release today opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, the Republicans focused on a “former union organizer” named Jen Jason. Except it was already shown almost two years ago that Jen Jason, while a former organizer, is actually a highly-paid anti-union consultant. Oops.

This morning SEIU unveiled online advertising to promote the New York Times‘ recent support of the early passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.