Now that we're closer than ever before to reforming our health care system, the opposition is ratcheting up the fear-mongering and deception. They'll say anything to dominate the public conversation and disrupt productive dialogue, and do anything to block reform--including harassment, intimidation, and physical violence.

For several days now, radical-fringe right-wing opponents bent on blocking any reform legislation have disrupted town hall meetings conducted by members of Congress. At the same time they're engaging in Astroturf [read: fake grassroots] activism, these radical-fringe groups are disseminating discredited myths about health care reform bills that were adopted by four Congressional committees. Astroturfing by conservative opponents of reform is particularly dishonest because it masks the true motivations of the powerful interests--like the desire of industries to maintain the status quo.

These conservative lobbyist-run groups are leading the way orchestrating town hall mobs.

FreedomWorks
According to TPM, FreedomWorks is teaming up with the Tea Party Patriots to target Blue Dogs on health care reform. "Take, for instance, an email exchange, obtained by TPMDC, between a protester and a FreedomWorks field organizer on a list serv operated by the latter. Last month, Tom Gaitens, a FreedomWorks field manager posted a spreadsheet containing contact information for Blue Dogs and their chiefs of staff, to a tea party organizers list serv that he manages." In addition, Roll Call reported that FreedomWorks is one of the organizations "behind the efforts" to disrupt town hall meetings. [Talking Points Memo, 8/4/2009; Roll Call, 8/5/2009] The group, chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, is emailing 380,000 supporters an "August Recess Action Kit" link this week.

Conservatives for Patients' Rights
Conservatives for Patients' Rights, a $20 million operation that's running a national campaign against a public plan to kill progressive health care reform, is now publicly taking credit for helping stir up the sometimes-rowdy outbursts targeting House Dems at town hall meetings around the country. Which makes these disruptions seem....a little less than spontaneous, or simply a reflection of grassroots sentiment. CPR has posted a list of congressional town halls to be held over August recess "as a resource for our visitors." The fact-checking website Politifact.com has rated Conservatives for Patients' Rights statements about health care reform, "Barely True."

Americans for Prosperity
Americans for Prosperity Helping to Organize Tea Party Protests. The Charlotte Observer reported that Americans for Prosperity is "the organization behind this year's taxpayer tea parties," and the Roanoke Times reported "the Tea Party Patriots and Americans for Prosperity organized the Nationwide Tea Party protest day." [Charlotte Observer, 7/22/2009; Roanoke Times, 7/18/2009] The group is listed as a "Health Care Freedom Coalition Partner" on the Tea Party Patriots website. It was established by oil magnate David Koch, and its creation is a result of a split from an earlier Koch-based enterprise, now called FreedomWorks (sound familiar?) AFP was also instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama, anti-tax tea party protests in April.

Americans for Prosperity's various fronts and disclosures that point to ever-increasing oil and corporate donations to the group are guided by AFP President Tim Phillips--who, as The Wonk Room notes, "has built a long career of inventing fake grassroots causes." Phillips' resume includes founding an Atlanta-based firm with Abramoff-connected Ralph Reed. The firm, Century Strategies, has a history of mounting "grassroots lobbying drives," and Reed in the past has said (when attempting to help Enron deregulate the electricity industry), "it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."

Club for Growth
Right-Wing founder Steven Moore pushed for ending all assistance to low-income Americans, calling Medicare "Catastrophic." In 2000, Moore advocated abolishing welfare, stating, "The most valuable step the Congress could take to help dismantle the welfare-poverty trap would be to abolish all programs that provide benefits for not working: food stamps, AFDC, and public housing, for example." In 2003, Moore wrote, "Every American taxpayer knows full well the fiscally catastrophic impact of programs like Medicare, Medicaid and other black-check income redistribution programs." [Washington Times, 4/07/00; Detroit News, 7/21/03]

Americans for Tax Reform/Grover Norquist
Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist Pushing Members to Attend Town Hall Meetings. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, "said he encourages his members to attend town-hall meetings - and arms them with suggested questions." [Roll Call, 8/5/2009]

A serious and civil discourse about healthcare reform - tied to facts, not myths - will substantially increase the public's support for reform. "America's families want the peace of mind that comes with knowing that health insurance and care can never be taken away - when they switch jobs, lose jobs, start a business, or become sick. That's why a civil discourse is so important, and that's why health insurance reform is essential," said SEIU Healthcare Chair Dennis Rivera.

Playing politics with health reform is simply unacceptable. We must fight back against lies and fear-mongering to drown out the opposition--and send the message that health care reform must happen this year. That starts with knowing who we're up against--so read our "fact checks" on FreedomWorks, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform/Grover Norquist.

Today, several workers went to Capitol Hill to attend a panel discussion about the Employee Free Choice Act, sponsored by the Alliance for Worker Freedom. Much to their dismay, the workers were escorted out of the event after its organizers complained to the Capitol Police.

The event was advertised as an information-gathering session for Congressional staffers to discuss the legislation, and have "questions addressed by experts in the field." And for the outside community, "a resource to gather and share information."

However, it quickly became evident when the workers were blocked from attending the event that these panelists were probably not going to be educating the room on how we can push for the protection of workers' rights. The event featured speakers from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate front groups the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and the Workforce Fairness Institute, among others--the same groups and donors that fight against good wages, workplace safety and the ability of workers to form unions in their workplaces.

You'd think that a meeting on Employee Free Choice would welcome the perspective of workers whose lives the legislation would most deeply effect -- but ironically, this was not the case.

It's pretty ridiculous that an organization called "The Alliance for Worker Freedom" would kick out workers from a Capitol Hill panel discussion and Q&A about the rights and freedoms of workers. Guess a misleading organization name is just one more degenerate attempt by this group to convince people that they're on the side of workers.

Republicans pursue failed strategy attacking Dems on Employee Free Choice

The National Republican Senatorial Committee is planning on going after Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), according to a Roll Call article today. Yet the NRSC seems to have already forgotten the lessons of the 2008 campaigns, in which groups spent millions attacking Democrats on Employee Free Choice only to see those candidates go on to win--with voters approving Employee Free Choice by a considerable margin.

"We thought elephants never forgot, but Republicans have clearly forgotten the lessons of the 2008 elections: attacking Democrats on Employee Free Choice simply doesn't work," said SEIU Political Director Jon Youngdahl. "The fact is, voters see through these misinformation campaigns by wealthy corporate lobbyists. Working families know that when it comes to protecting their jobs and giving them a voice in the workplace, greedy CEOs just aren't on their side."

In 2008, Opponents Spent Millions Attacking Democratic Candidates, But the Democrats Still Won and the Voters Still Supported EFCA

In 2008, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and front groups like Americans for Job Security, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and the Employee Freedom Action Fund spent upwards of $20 million to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. This includes more than $6.3 million on TV ads specifically targeting Democratic Senate candidates on the issue in battleground states.

These attacks were completely ineffective. Not only were six of the targeted Democratic candidates elected, but research shows that a majority of voters in these battleground states supported the Employee Free Choice Act by wide margins even after the millions spent by the bill's opponents. A Hart Research survey conducted in November in seven Senate battleground states where anti-Employee Free Choice ads ran found that voters supported the Employee Free Choice Act by a 27-point margin.

Meet the new Right-to-Work-for-Less laws: state ballot initiatives to mandate "secret ballot" elections for union votes, trying to preempt the Employee Free Choice Act. On December 30, 2008, a new coalition calling itself the "Save Our Secret Ballot" (SOSB) coalition emerged onto the scene, announcing an under-the-radar state-level campaign to amend the state constitutions of Arizona, Arkansas, Missouri, Nevada and Utah to require a secret-ballot election for union representation.

What we really have here is yet another misleadingly-named corporate front group, whose real goal is to prevent workers from having a voice in an economy that works for everybody, not just for the wealthy. In Nevada and Utah, the legislature would place the proposed amendment on the ballot, while the coalition has begun to gather signatures in Arizona, Arkansas, and Missouri. SOSB hopes to expand its efforts to put initiatives on the ballot to prevent workers from opting in to form unions through majority sign-up to additional states.

Save Our Secret Ballot (SOSB) is a coalition of right-wing think tanks whose ideas have led us into the current economic crisis, working with individuals with ties to the Jack Abramoff scandal and a recent high-profile financial scandal.

Proposed State Constitutional Amendment

The 47-word amendment reads:

"The right of individuals to vote by secret ballot is fundamental. Where state or federal law requires elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation, the right of individuals to vote by secret ballot shall be guaranteed."

The proposed language would require a secret ballot for any election required by state or federal law for:

(1) public office
(2) public initiatives or referenda
(3) employee representation

SOSB suggests that elections for homeowner associations and corporate boards may also be impacted by amendment language in some states.

Who is SOSB?

SOSB appears to be a project of the Goldwater Institute (which wrote the language) and the Heritage Foundation (whose representative chairs the SOSB national advisory board). The SOSB coalition itself has a national advisory board and a number of local supporters who have also been named in the press surrounding the public campaign kickoff.

The SOSB coalition refuses to disclose donors.

Advisory Board members

• Former Rep. Ernest Istook (R-OK), national advisory board chairman, Heritage Foundation. The Congressman received donations from Jack Abramoff (which were later returned), his office used an Abramoff company skybox, and his former chief of staff John Albaugh pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the House in connection to gifts from Abramoff clients. Istook ran for Oklahoma Governor in 2006, but lost in a 66-34 landslide to the Democratic nominee.
• Clint Bolick, Goldwater Institute, author of initiative. Bolick previously worked on defending school voucher programs and opposing affirmative action.
• Jonathan E. Johnson III, President, Overstock.com. Overstock.com was under SEC investigation in early 2008, and Johnson was accused on financial blogs of lying about the company's accounting practices and engaging in improper sales of stock.
• Gilbert Baker, Arkansas State Senator. Baker stepped down as Senate Majority Leader to focus on his own re-election campaign. U.S. Senator Pryor raised funds for Baker's opponent.
• Adam Hasner, Florida State House Majority Leader. Hasner has promoted alternative energy and sponsored a law requiring Florida's pension funds to divest from Iran.
• John Loudon, Missouri State Senator
• Mark Meierhenry, former South Dakota Attorney General
• Brian M. Johnson, executive director of the Alliance for Worker Freedom, a project of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform
• Paul Jacob, President, Citizens in Charge, a right-wing think tank.

Other SOSB Supporters

• Tim Mooney, Scottsdale (AZ) political consultant. Mooney was previously involved in an effort to require schools to spend 65% of all funding on direct classroom expenses.
• Audrey Mullen, SOSB spokesperson who previously worked for Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform.
• Sydney Hay, President, Arizona Mining Association. Hay registered the Arizona initiative. Hay recently failed in her bid to represent Arizona's first Congressional District.
• Pat Lilly, former city manager, St. Joseph (MO). Lilly says the period between filing for a union election and the election itself was critical to "educating" workers when he himself defeated a union drive among city workers in the mid-1990s.
• Bill Vickery, Arkansas political consultant, co-chair of Arkansas SOSB.
• Carl Wimmer, Utah state representative. Wimmer apparently plans to sponsor the amendment in the Utah legislature.
• Tibi Ellis, Nevada state chair of SOSB
• Dave Rouchka, owner of Medallion Electric (Sedalia, MO), co-chair of Missouri SOSB
• Glenn Hamer, President, Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry
• Jeff Roe, Kansas City political consultant

You and I know that the same people and corporations who have destroyed our economy, shipped jobs overseas and created the largest gap in pay between workers and CEOs oppose the Employee Free Choice Act. See below for some of their erroneous claims and the facts that you need in order to refute them.

Claim 1: The current process for workers to organize unions and gain recognition is carefully designed and tested by time.

Corporate interest groups would have us believe that supporters of majority sign-up recognition are seeking to upend a stable, sacrosanct and long-established system for recognizing workers desire to form a union. However, a detailed and unbiased look at the history of union recognition paints a very different picture. Majority sign-up has established roots in labor law as a vehicle for achieving representation - indeed it is still used in situations where the employer agrees to voluntary recognition--and corporate interests have fought against it since its inception in a contentious debate that continues today. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has found that majority-sign up is a legitimate way to determine majority support.¹

Majority sign-up was a legitimate union recognition option under the original representation process codified in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Even after the statute was revised by the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments, the National Labor Relations Board still recognized majority sign-up unless the employer could show a good faith doubt about the majority status.² Gradually, the burden shifted onto unions to prove that an employer was acting in bad faith, but only since a pair of Supreme Court cases in 1969 and 1974 have employers had the unilateral ability to reject majority sign-up procedures and require an NLRB-supervised election.³

Claim 2: The current process for workers to organize unions and gain recognition is fair and quick.

Corporate interest group-funded research points to general NLRB statistics concerning isolated aspects of the organizing process over narrow periods of time to support their argument that the union election process is quick and fair.

In fact, reliance on statistics about time frames for elections misrepresents the reality of what it really takes for workers' to unionize under current law. A comprehensive study of union-organizing drives across several stages of the process by two MIT Professors at the Sloan School of Management refutes these claims handily.⁴ After looking at 22,000 petitions for an election filed with the NLRB between 1999 and 2004, they conclude that:

• In only 20 percent of the cases where, after showing substantial support by workers for union representation, a petition was filed with the NLRB for an election, did the workers ever reach a first contract with their employer. Examining the process, from the filing of a petition to the end of the bargaining process, shows that the current system is structured for delay, obstruction and ultimate failure. Only 65 percent of petitions filed with the NLRB actually resulted in elections and workers won only 56 percent of these elections. Of the workers who won NLRB elections, only 56 percent reached a first contract with their employers.
• Unfair Labor Practices committed by employers after the petition for an election was filed made it less likely that an election would be held - reducing the probability by 25 percent. The largest effect of unfair labor practices was to keep employees who had indicated they wanted union representation from having access to a fair election.

The Employee Free Choice Act ensures that when a majority of workers sign cards saying that they want to form a union, they aren't subject to a lengthy and obstruction-filled process.

Claim 3: Union elections work just like a regular election for public office - supporters of majority sign-up are attacking democratic values.

If one looks closely at the current union election process, you would see that it does not resemble anything that would be considered fair or democratic. Simply labeling some process as a "secret ballot election" doesn't make it fair or democratic. The NLRB election process looks more like a lopsided and unfair election process set up by an authoritarian regime with anti-union employers playing the part of foreign dictator. Under current rules, management is allowed to spread its anti-union propaganda throughout the workplace , while pro-union employees are prohibited from doing the same. Employers are free to stage anti-union campaign rallies and meetings on work time in the work place with workers required to attend. Employers can also subject workers to mandatory one on one anti-union sessions with the very supervisors who have the power to fire them, give them work assignments, recommend them for promotion or discipline, grant overtime and authorize time off for family emergencies. In contrast, union organizers, who have no power to punish or reward workers or to compel their attention, are barred from the workplace - or even publicly-used, company-owned areas like parking lots.⁵

Studies by social scientists show that employer threats are a widespread part of election campaigns under the current process. A study by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University (funded by the United States Trade Deficit Review Commission, not a big corporation) of 400 NLRB certification election campaigns found that more than half of all employers made threats to close all or part of the plant during a union organizing drive.⁶

These threats proved effective - the election win rate at plants where employers made these threats was 38 percent, compared to 51 percent where they did not. The study found no correlation between a company's financial condition and the likelihood that a threat would be made, instead it identifies anti-union animus as the principle cause of these threats. The Employee Free Choice Act includes meaningful penalties on companies that fire or intimidate workers, which the evidence suggests is widespread.

1. See NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co. 395 U.S. 575


2. See Joy Silk Mills, Inc. (85 NLRB 1263)


3. See NLRB v.. Gissel Packing Co. 395 U.S. 575 and Linden Lumber Co. v. NLRB419 U.S. 301


4. John-Paul Ferugson, "The Eyes of the Needles: A Sequential Model of Union Organizing Drives, 1999-2004." MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, March 15, 2008.


5. Gordon Lafer, Neither Free Nor Fair: The Subversion of Democracy Under National Labor Relation Elections. American Rights at Work Project, July 2007.


6. Kate Bronfenbreener, Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages, and Union Organizing. Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations, September 2000.