Building a sustainable economic recovery

On Sunday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a piece that I coauthored with Drs. Levine (UWM) and Maranto (Marquette) on how the Employee Free Choice Act will help build a sustainable recovery. It begins:

Judging from the recent competing editorials in The Wall Street Journal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other leading newspapers, and from the escalating rhetoric of business and labor, the nation is about to be put through another destructive, ideologically based battle over a labor law reform bill known as the Employee Free Choice Act. The Chamber of Commerce describes the coming battle as "Armageddon." This couldn't come at a worse time for the country. The deepening economic crisis needs business and labor working together with the new administration to build a sustainable economic recovery.

The rest of the piece is linked here.

Obama keeps promises to labor, but Corporate America fight back!

The New York Times' labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse, writes that labor has been very pleased with President Obama's efforts to reverse the Bush administration's anti-labor policies and with his labor appointments.

But Greenhouse warns that business organizations such as the the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are gearing up to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), legislation that would make it easier for workers to organize unions.

We can expect the Chamber to use fear mongering and the courts to oppose EFCA in the same way that the Milwaukee Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce (MMAC) has used them to try to stop the implementation of Milwaukee's paid sick day ordinance.

The current recession is the consequence of a thirty year failed experiment with laissez faire economics. But the U.S. Chamber and its local affiliates like the MMAC remain wedded to the market extremist pillars of deregulation, privatization and anti-unionism.

Greenhouse's article is linked here.