I was paging through my copy of the New York Times today and discovered a full-page ad by a 501(c)(3) group called "The Center for Union Facts."
The group, listed here on Sourcewatch has in the past and still is, working against the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
The ad, and a little background on the group, after the jump.
So here's the ad that was in the Times today.
Amazing. It somehow ties Rod Blagojevich and ACORN with the EFCA. I won't call the logic sketchy, simply because there's no logic whatsoever.
This is not the first time that the group has run anti-Union propaganda before as well.
According to SourceWatch:
In May 2006 the Center for Union Facts, launched its first TV ad campaign. The 30-second spot, running on Fox News and local markets, has "actors posing as workers" saying "sarcastically what they 'love' about unions," like paying dues, union leaders' "fat-cat lifestyles," and discrimination against minorities. The ad campaign cost $3 million, which was raised "from companies, foundations and individuals that Mr. Berman won't identify."
They also ran a publicity campaign against the EFCA when it was under deliberation last year.
In June 2007, the group campaigned heavily against the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation which "would give employees at a workplace the right to unionize as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so." The Center for Union Facts has spent "$500,000 on newspaper and broadcast advertisements this week alone," reported the New York Times on June 20, 2007. The group's print ads for the campaign compared union leaders to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling the bill a "scheme to eliminate workers' right to a secret ballot."
This group has a lot of resources, undoubtedly because its members are anti-union corporations who'd rather spend money on anti-union campaigns than paying their employees more.
The group won round one when there weren't enough votes in the Senate to invoke cloture and the bill died. But this group is scared.
At the same time, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is comprised of "virtually hundreds of businesses, chambers of commerce and trade associations," was also spending millions to defeat the bill. "The folks behind the ad campaign fear that if Sen. Barack Obama, an Employee Free Choice Act sponsor, is elected president and power shifts to the Democrats in the Senate, the bill will become law," according to a New Hampshire paper.
So now we know why this ad was run. Corporations are running scared. They surely will spend considerably more to try to defeat it again. We need to remember that while things are going to be considerably more favorable to EFCA's passage in January, that groups like this will stop at nothing to try and kill the bill before it becomes law.
We cannot get complacent.