Rachel Maddow, radio and TV host, played an audio recording Friday night of convicted felon Bernie Madeoff railing against the Employee Free Choice Act that is now before Congress. To say Madeoff expressed hatred and loathing for the Act is probably an understatement. The recording came from a conference call that was sponsored by Bank of America some months back before Madeoff ever hit the news for his crimes.
I was hoping the recording would be up on her website but that looks like it is at least three days behind her air dates. I will link to it when it becomes available. But the recording is pretty straight forward - Madeoff talking very forcefully about how everyone should fight to defeat this bill.
If there is a more hated man in America than Bernie Madeoff right now, I would be hard pressed to name him. So here is my question.*** Let us say you are the director of a firm whose job it has become to whip up public support FOR the Employee Free Choice Act bill. Do you use this recording of Madeoff complete with his name attached for obvious purposes? ***
Hundreds of millions of dollars are going to spent by both sides in this campaign to pass/defeat the bill. There will be no shortage of money for these purposes.
Now I am sure the easy thing to do is to take the moral high road and say something like “if all one wants to do is win and is willing to do anything to do so regardless of the ethics involved, then yes, use it”. But to move discussion along, let us assume that if you are in the business of political advertising campaigns, purity and ethics are not your top priority. Lets please look more at pragmatics.
My question is one of pure hard-edged reality. If you were in charge of advertising to help pass the Employee Free Choice Act do you make as part of your campaign the recording of Bernie Madeoff railing against it?
What is the up side… what is the down side?
While I see the temptation, I would not employ such an flagrantly fallacious tactic. Partially out of wanting to win for the right reasons, and partially out of not wanting the tactic to be turned back on me. If Cause A is “good” because Madoff dislikes it, it follows just as well that all causes he dislikes are “good”. So, while I might score a point for EFCA, if I do that well I might be scoring points for a bunch of things I strongly disagree with. If an anti-Madoff metric is what is used to prove righteousness, than I’d better be certain about his views on taxes, immigration, abortion, etc.
But, of course, this stupidity is used all the time.
I don’t think this would be useful in and of itself, but it could be useful as one bit of a larger campaign.
The anti-EFCA forces are trying to spin the bill as bad for workers–“it takes away your right to a secret ballot!” (which it doesn’t)–and they’re going to be spending a shit-ton of money to get that message out there. So an effective bit of counter-spin might be, “if EFCA is such a bad thing for the little guy, why are the fattest of the fatcats spending $200 million to defeat it?”
Doctor J
I think you have it right. Not useful as THE campaign, but pretty useful as a part of a larger campaign.
To the people that object, it should be noted that a political issue advertising campaign is not run by the same rules that the Yale Logic Club operates under. You do not get points for avoiding Latin terms on the unofficial list of Logical Fallacies. The real world does not operate that way.
No, it doesn’t, because no such right exists now. As it stands, if a majority of eligible employees sign union cards, the employer doesn’t have to call for a NLRB election–they can go ahead and recognize the union. In practice, they usually do call for the election, because it gives them time to bust the union. (That’s a less than charitable way to put it, but that’s what it comes down to.)
What’s more, EFCA preserves the right to call for a NLRB election if that’s what the employees want. It just moves that decision from management to labor.
So it doesn’t take away the right to a secret ballot–it gives employees the right to bypass the secret ballot process when they already know that a majority support the union.
There are legitimate criticisms of the bill, but this isn’t one of them.
The ones who want a union and will browbeat their coworkers into signing the card?
Or the ones who don’t want a union, but are pressured into signing the card so they don’t get into a humongous fight with their coworker over unionization, souring the workplace environment for the next 10 years?
If you can’t manage to get 50% of the workforce to vote yes in a secret ballot, then you shouldn’t be unionized. Nobody can pressure anybody in a secret ballot, that’s the point, not coworkers, not management.
Those who are trying to defeat this bill seem to be marching down the street with big silken banners with gold lettering embossed that reads “PROTECT THE SECRET BALLOT”. The opposit side clings to the idea of MAJORITY RULES. Both are treasured American ideals. It is not a matter of one side having God with them and the other is using illegitimate tactics.
Those who cling to the idea of the Secret Ballot as the final word in this debate… why do you conveniently ignore the dirty tactics that many employers then employ to defeat the election that follows?
Because they hate the idea of people voluntarily banding together to fight for a common goal, especially when that common goal is to better their lives. It’s so un-American, ya know, to do that. Everyone would be better off if we just trusted the wealthy and powerful, who always do what’s right for everyone. I mean, if they didn’t know better, how did they get to be rich and powerful?
Because the alternative is an Open Ballot. It’s ludicrous to think that an open ballot is going to give you anything resembling the honest opinion of the workforce. I can’t believe that honest intelligent people would even attempt to argue that the open ballot process isn’t fundamentally and irreparably flawed with regards pressuring people to vote yes.
I don’t get that either. Conservatives are always going on about how they don’t trust the government – an insitution which is accountable to them, chosen by them, and which thet can even become a part of – but they show nothing but childlike trust and fawning obesience for their corporate slavemasters who have no accountability or accessibility to them at all. It’s completely illogical. What makes them think that private companies are more trustworthy than democratically elected governments?
Iy’s almost as though the corporations hire people to spout propaganda t them all day and tell them that opposing the corporate agenda is unpatriotic and anti-God.
cheesesteak…So your choice then is between only bad things? Why are you not concerned with making these labor elections true elections which are run fairly and which remove the advantages and powers that the company has in them?
Cannot you see that one big reason for the Employee Free Choice Act is a history of rigged elctions, abuses by employers and “secret ballots” which are a ruse and a bad joke?
What would you be willing to advocate in reforms to remove employer abuses in these labor elections to remove the necessity of the Employee Free Choice Act?
No, the alternative is skipping the ballot altogether, which is what card checks are designed to allow unions to do. The “secret ballot” language is just a red herring. The companies don’t care about secret ballots (and that’s a right which does not exist anyway with regard to labor unions), demanding them is just a delaying tactic to give them more time to try to bust the union.
Two reasons: One, I loathe the idea of unionization, but I don’t really want to argue it in the office, I’d rather just do my job. Two, management’s heavy threat is that I’ll lose my job, the union’s heavy threat is that they’ll make my life outside of work hell.
Who says I’m not? What I don’t like is “leveling the field” by completely rigging the ballot process for the union.
Having the “vote” be with a pro-union coworker staring you in the face, asking you personally to sign, knowing full well that there is going to be fallout if you don’t sign right then and there, is NOT a fair vote. Is anyone going to attempt to suggest that this is a legitimate way to conduct a vote? Under those conditions, you’ll get 25% of people to sign a petition to promote grinding up puppies and kittens into sausage.
If the elections are rigged, or abused by employers, then fix the election process.
BTW, one aspect of this issue I don’t like is the assumption that the company is in the wrong for advocating against unionization. Unions are not inherently the best option for all employees or all industries, and if the company believes that their employees will be better off without one, they have the right to say that.