The Enlightened Despot

If I see one more sentence like this, I may lose it:

Card check — the Employee Free Choice Act — is as dead as Audrina’s eyes.

That’s Marc Ambinder, who as far as I can tell doesn’t even have an axe to grind here, but says things like this constantly. Those who do, like Byron York, are even worse:

American Rights at Work is an important part of Big Labor’s push for the Employee Free Choice Act, known more accurately as card check.

‘Card check’ and ‘EFCA’ do not refer to the same thing! EFCA is a proposed bill being kicked around Congress. Card check is one of the policies that EFCA would enact. (Well, strictly speaking, the policy in question mandates that management accept decisions to unionize made via card check, which itself is a procedure. But, appearences to the contrary, I’m not just splitting hairs for the hell of it, so let’s not worry about that.) Equating them is a textbook category mistake.* People on both sides of the debate sometimes act as if ‘card check’ is a slur, but since it doesn’t convey much of anything to the person who doesn’t already know what it is, it seems to be all that one could hope for in a referring expression. Meanwhile, ‘Employee Free Choice Act’ is certainly loaded, but legislators are always giving bills names that cast them in a positive light, for obvious reasons (see USA Patriot Act, the). Coming up with insulting nicknames for bills may be good sport for the Michelle Malkins of this world, no serious person is going to form his opinion on a piece of legislation based on the fact that it is named ‘The Wicked Awesome Act’. But whatever problem you might have with ‘EFCA’ or ‘card check’, using the other won’t help, since they have very different meanings.

And this isn’t just a technicality. Other countries have a card check policy, but they of course don’t have EFCA on the books - it’s a proposed American law. Meanwhile, EFCA contains a lot of significant measures unrelated to card check. Indeed, card check itself is becoming increasingly irrelevant - there is simply no reason to think Democrats can put together 60 Senate votes for any bill that includes it, at least not until after the 2010 midterms.

At this point, the policy to watch is mandatory binding arbitration. Mandatory binding arbitration would require management and a newly formed union to enter a binding arbitration process for a two-year contract if the two sides are unable to come to terms on their own. The major compromise bills that have been introduced contain neither mandatory arbitration nor card check, and are about as popular with labor as Japanese car companies. Meanwhile, anti-labor types are worried that Democrats are planning to drop card check as a compromise for enacting mandatory binding arbitration.

For what it’s worth, I’m not wild about mandatory binding arbitration, and I’d rather see the Starbucks et al compromise go through, but it’s all a lot better than card check. But, really, I wish people would just keep their terminology straight.

UPDATE: I forgot to include the footnote about category mistakes indicated by the above asterix. I’ve corrected this in a seperate post.