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Comment Re:Duh. (Score 1) 1601

The Employee Free Choice Act doesn't do away with secret ballots. Secret ballots are still an option. Secret ballots are, in fact, required if more than 30% but less than the majority of employees publicly support the union, and secret ballots are still used to de-unionize. The reason for this is that employers have a long time between the union declaring its intention to be a union and the time when the official vote happens for the Employer to do things like holding mandatory "If You Join A Union, The Company Will Fold And Your Children Will Die Penniless And Hungry In The Street Like Dogs" meetings. Under the EFCA, if a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to form a union", then it works. If a majority of the employees get together and say "We want to have a secret ballot to determine whether or not to form a union", that works too. Under the current rules, that first one doesn't work unless the employer authorizes it.

From The Committee on Education and Labor:

harassment by unions is not the problem. In a study of a more than 60-year period, the Human Resources Policy Association listed 113 NLRB cases which they claimed involved union deception and/or coercion in obtaining authorization card signatures. Careful examination of those cases, however, reveals that union misconduct was found in only 42 of those 113 claimed cases. By contrast, in 2005 alone, over 30,000 workers received back pay from employers that illegally fired or otherwise discriminated against them for their union activities.

If it were something like "There are twice as many instances of Management coercion than Union coercion", I could see that you'd have a position to say "Well, those numbers are probably massaged a bit". But this is thirty-thousand in one year vs 42 cases over the course of six decades. An average of a whopping 7/10ths of a case per year, compared to tens of thousands.

So in conclusion: The fears of rampant, coercing union bosses are mostly mythical. The fears of management illegally preventing unions that a majority of employees really want are very much grounded in reality.

Censorship

Boston Bans Boing Boing From City Wi-Fi 215

DrFlounder writes "The city of Boston has apparently blocked access to Boing Boing on the municipal Wi-Fi. This is possibly due to the popular blog's known Mooninite sympathies." Update: 4/22 13:11 GMT by KD : Seth Finkelstein did some research and posted an explanation of the blockage to his blog. "'Arbitrary and capricious' seems the relevant characterization."

PS3 Delay To Have Little Impact? 79

According to analyst firm Strategy Analytics, the PS3's delay is unlikely to have much of an effect on the next-gen race, reports GameDailyBiz. From the article: "While 2006 sales will clearly fall short of previous expectations, Strategy Analytics maintains its previous forecast of PS3 sales of 121.8 million units through 2012 ... This compares to expected sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360 of 58.8 million units over the same period." Gamasutra reports that, from Steve Ballmer's perspective, the opposite is true. From that article: "In every other generation, the first guy to 10 million consoles was the number one seller in the generation ... Did we just get an even better opportunity to be the first guy to 10 million? Yeah, of course we did." This all assumes the console launches this year.

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