On February 4, union lobbyists and their supporters rallied in front of the Senate building hoping to win support for card-check legislation. It marks the beginning of an aggressive campaign to convince enough senators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act which is expected to reach the Senate floor soon.

On the same day, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers sent 50 business leaders to Congress to lobby against it.

“This is a bill that will be no less than a firestorm on Capitol Hill,” said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration, and employee benefits for the chamber as reported by Mark Schoeff Jr. in the online magazine Workforce Management.

Union leaders, however, believe most workers want this bill.  After their rally, they delivered petitions they said contained 1.5 million names supporting the legislation.

During the last session of Congress, the bill passed the House of Representatives but was blocked in the Senate. Democrats supporting this bill are hopeful it can pass this time despite threats of a filibuster by Senate Republicans.

This act is designed to allow unions to organize workers without a secret ballot. Instead, unions would be able to form a collective bargaining unit simply by counting the number of people who expressed an interest in organizing.

According to Workforce Management, Democrat Representative George Miller of California, chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, believes the bill will enable workers to join unions without intimidation from bosses.

It is no coincidence that both sides use the intimidation argument to support their views. Unions believe employers will intimate workers with threats of job cuts and lost benefits, and employers believe unions will intimidate workers who do not want to organize. Supporters of this legislation, however, say the bill offers workers a choice between a secret ballot and a card-check process.

Nevertheless, many employers, and workers, prefer a secret ballot to the card-check system. For that reason, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has, since spring 2008, spent $10 million opposing this bill and will, according to Workforce Management, spend substantially more in the coming weeks.

For employers, this bill can severely limit their ability to argue against collective bargaining.  For unions, this bill will open new opportunities to organize in ways, some would argue, may be intimidating and often unfair to the employer.

To learn more about this story, go tohttp://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/15/49.php.