Veto Threat Looms Over House Labor Bill

President Bush makes a statement to members of the media, in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007, as he met with members of military service organizations. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) (Charles Dharapak - AP)

WASHINGTON -- President Bush would veto legislation championed by Democrats and labor groups that would make it easier to organize unions by eliminating employer rights to demand secret-ballot elections, the White House said Wednesday.

The House is to vote on the legislation Thursday and, with help from pro-labor Republicans from the Northeast, it is almost certain to pass. But the margin of support is expected to fall well short of the two-thirds needed to overturn a presidential veto.

The Employee Free Choice Act, also known as the card check bill, is the top legislative goal of labor groups eager to reassert themselves with the emergence of the Democratic majority.

The current system is broken because employers can coerce and intimidate workers into rejecting unionization, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a phone interview this week. The House bill, he said, is "the most important improvement in labor law in many decades."

But the White House, in a statement, said the measure "would strip workers of the fundamental democratic right to a supervised private ballot election." Substituting a card check mechanism under which unions would get bargaining rights as soon as a majority of workers at a plant sign approval cards, "would turn back the clock 60 years and return us to a failed system."

Under the bill a company would no longer have the right to demand a secret-ballot election, overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, before a union can be certified.

The legislation also imposes tougher penalties on companies that violate the rights of workers trying to organize and sets up a binding arbitration process to prevent companies from thwarting a new union by bargaining in bad faith on an initial contract.

Unions see obstacles to organizing as a major reason union membership has dropped from 20 percent of waged and salary workers in 1983 to 12 percent in 2006. Discounting civil servants, that percentage is 7.4 percent, the Labor Department says.

Both business groups opposed to the bill and organized labor have launched major ad and lobbying campaigns. The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, an anti-bill business coalition, said it would run radio ads in three formerly Republican districts captured by Democratic freshmen Tim Mahoney of Florida, Nancy Boyda of Kansas and Heath Shuler of North Carolina.

"We want to put members of the House and Senate on notice that we are watching how they vote on this issue," said coalition spokesman Todd Harris.

Democrats shrugged off GOP charges that the bill was payback for union financial support that helped put them in the majority.

For the past 12 years when Republicans controlled the House, Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J., told workers at a news conference Wednesday, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies and defense contractors profiting in Iraq had their day. "Tomorrow is your day," he said.