Telling it like it isn't

Janet Daley says of the Employee Free Choice Act:

The Act would effectively abolish the right of trade union members to secret ballots.

Only if you use the word ‘effectively’ in the sense of ‘not’. It doesn’t get rid of it, and employees can still demand it if they want it. Look here.

She goes on:

In other words, it would give American union bosses the kind of power to intimidate their membership into strike action that used to belong to British union leaders before the Thatcherite reforms.

Only if you mean ‘in other words’ to mean ‘according to the most paranoid interpretation possible’.

The EFCA will be a rebalancing of the machinery around union recognition that will favour unions. But, and it’s a BIG BUT, it will only result in higher union density if that’s what employees want. And members will (as always) determine what kind of representation they get. So to argue that the EFCA will lead to unaccountable unions browbeating members into strike action is simply paranoid gibbering. It says a lot about the deeply-ingrained hostility of the modern-day Right to trade unions, especially given the low density in the US, that they resort to this sort of scare-mongering.