Waiting For the (Blue) Dog Days

by digby

According to Stephanoupoulos, EFCA isn’t going to come up for a vote any time before summer. I had heard it had pretty much fallen off the agenda early on, and believed it when I read this comment from Obama back in January (which Steph also links to.)

I think the basic principal of making it easier and fairer for workers who want to join a union, join a union is important. And the basic outline of the Employee Fair Choice are ones that I agree with. But I will certainly listen to all parties involved including from labor and the business community which I know considers this to be the devil incarnate. I will listen to parties involved and see if there are ways that we can bring those parties together and restore some balance.

You know, now if the business community’s argument against the Employee Free Choice Act is simply that it will make it easier for people to join unions and we think that is damaging to the economy then they probably won’t get too far with me. If their arguments are we think there are more elegant ways of doing this or here are some modifications or tweaks to the general concept that we would like to see. Then I think that’s a conversation that not only myself but folks in labor would be willing to have. But, so that’s the general approach that I am interested in taking. But in terms of time table, if we are losing half a million jobs a month then there are no jobs to unionize. So my focus first is on those key economic priority items that I just mentioned.

That seemed to me to be a pretty clear signal that the administration wasn’t going to push to pass the bill that passed last year. And so they aren’t. If the unions don’t mind, I guess nobody else should. And they don’t seem to mind. So, we’ll see where we stand in four or five months I guess.

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