Business groups pressure senators to oppose union ‘card check’ bill

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and two other senators have emerged as focal points of an intense lobbying campaign aimed at heading off a proposed compromise over “card check,” the controversial legislation that would make it easier for labor unions to organize workers.

The bill has been the top priority of organized labor, while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has earmarked $20 million over two years to kill it. On Wednesday, the chamber flew 287 executives to Washington to lobby members of Congress -- with more than 180 of them coming from California to press Feinstein to end her support for the possible compromise.

Meantime, a small group of labor activists sought to exert pressure on Feinstein, beginning what they said would be a two-day fast in a tent erected outside the doors of her office in downtown San Francisco.

The other two lobbying targets are Democrats Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, both of whom supported the bill in the past but came out against it this year. The compromise talks have been convened by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a strong labor supporter and original sponsor of the bill who has vowed to push it to a vote this year.

Earlier this week, Harkin said that if no compromise was worked out, he would seek to force a vote on the floor -- a move that would put Democrats in an awkward position with organized labor, one of their largest political allies.

As originally drafted, the card-check measure would have allowed unions to start a bargaining unit if a majority of workers at a company signed cards requesting one. Businesses protested that the proposed system would end management’s option to call for secret-ballot elections. Union officials say that such elections allow companies to intimidate workers. Businesses complained that the measure would open employees to intimidation from union officials.

The chamber and other business groups pressed their arguments so successfully that the original card-check provision was declared dead. In its place, Feinstein -- a former cosponsor of the original legislation -- floated a proposal that would allow workers to mail cards or ballots to a third party rather than turn them in at the workplace.

Labor, which has seen more than half a dozen of the original cosponsors drop their support this year, is open to considering the idea. Business is opposed to any proposed compromise.

That left Feinstein at the center of a furious lobbying effort.

Of the California executives who flew to Washington, 20 were selected to meet with Feinstein to express their opposition. Among them was Haady Lashkari, an executive at Community Memorial Health System in Ventura, who said he told Feinstein “what the legislation could mean for the hospital,” which has no unions.

He said he was concerned that the proposed law “would take away the employees’ right to confidentiality in a union election.”

Feinstein, he and others said, listened politely as the business executives expressed their opposition. During a breakfast meeting at the chamber headquarters in Washington, Feinstein’s name was mentioned again and again by leaders who have vowed to defeat any part of the bill.

“The size of the California [business delegation] reflects the concern that Californians have about Feinstein’s role in the compromise talks,” said Glenn Spencer, who heads the chamber’s Workforce Freedom Initiative, which has arranged many of the fly-ins to Capitol Hill in recent weeks.

In addition to battling against the central card-check provision of the original bill, businesses also have opposed a provision that calls for binding arbitration if negotiations get delayed.

Specter has suggested a compromise that would replace the detailed arbitration with something called “last best offer arbitration,” in which a mediator would choose between settlement proposals suggested by each side.

Labor is open to considering this idea too. But the business organizations, the chamber and the National Assn. of Manufacturers are firmly opposed. “We object because you would still have an arbitrator making a decision. It undermines the very notion of free collective bargaining,” Spencer said.

Despite business’ intransigence, said Art Pulaski of the California Labor Federation, “life goes on without them. Negotiations are continuing.”

“For us,” he said, “it’s a clear choice between the demands of CEOs and their multimillion-dollar perk packages and the needs of the working class.”

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tom.hamburger@latimes.com