Specter and Labor: Deal or No Deal?

Posted by: Dan Beucke on September 17

By Moira Herbst

Sen. Arlen Specter’s assertion on Sept. 15 that he and fellow Senate Democrats had “pounded out an employees’-choice bill which will meet labor’s objectives” hasn’t been confirmed by Senate Democrats or union leaders. It seems Specter may have been playing to the crowd—-in this case a room of hundreds of union delegates at an AFL-CIO conference in Pittsburgh—with the statement. “Our understanding is that there has not been a deal yet,” a staffer Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), one of several negotiators on a revised Employee Free Choice Act, told BusinessWeek on Sept. 17.

Labor leaders and staffers aren’t saying a deal is done either (though earlier this month incoming AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he might support a bill calling for speedier union elections instead of the so-called card-check procedure). “Nothing is going to happen [legislatively] until the health-care debate is finished,” says Christy Setzer, a spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union, part of the Change to Win union coalition. “Many important pieces of legislation will have to wait, and labor law reform is one of them.”

Setzer added: “Senator Tom Harkin [D-Iowa] is working diligently get support for the bill. He says that we’ll have 60 votes as soon as we can seat the new senator from Massachusetts. We trust in his leadership and are pushing for that senator to be seated so we can move the votes.”