McCaskill: Card-Check (NOT EFCA) is Dead This Year

Sen Claire McCaskill (D-MO) has told reporters that 'card-check' (but not the hallucinogenically-named Employee Free Choice Act) is dead this year:

[via National Review]

McCaskill said that while senators were still negotiating the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a controversial bill to reform union organizing rules, it was unlikely to even include the actual "card check" provision itself, which has been the subject of malign by conservatives and business groups.

"I don't think that card check is going to come up," McCaskill said during a weekly conference call with Missouri journalists. "It has not come up, and believe me: if card check, the way it was drafted, was going to come up, it probably would have come up early in 2009 as opposed to now."

EFCA was a top priority of the labor community heading into last year's Congress, but the emergence of a series of Democrats to have questioned some of its provisions, along with timing issues on jobs and healthcare legislation, had left the bill on the backburner.

"I think there's a lot of negotiation that's going on about card check," McCaskill said. "Businesses are at the table, and frankly I don't think the card checking part is the part that's being discussed at this point; I think that's been abandoned."

While McCaskill did not say what is being negotiated as an alternative, the prospects still likely include some version of first-contract arbitration, monetary fines that the union-controlled NLRB could levy, as well as equal time/equal access for union organizers to come onto employer property.

Presumably, the job-destroying Employee Free Choice Act will never really die...at least not until after November.
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