'Card check' best hope for auto workers union?

And, of course, there’s a political aspect to this: the UAW has long been a bastion of strength for the Democrats.

The UAW’s political action committee spent $11.5 million to help Democratic candidates this year.

Decline in UAW membership
The UAW's political clout will wane as its membership does. The UAW hit a peak of 1.5 million members in 1979, but declined to about 460,000 at the end of 2007. “In Flint, we used to have 80,000 GM employees now we have about 18,000,” Kildee noted.

An early vote on the “card check” bill in the new Congress is a top priority of labor unions.

Asked how he’d vote on the bill, Democratic Representative-elect Bobby Bright, who won what had been a Republican seat in Alabama, said, “I’m not going to do anything that is going to harm in any way the growth of our businesses” in his congressional district.

Bright's southeast Alabama district is home to a Hyundai manufacturing plant and is right next door to a new Kia plant across the state line in Georgia.

“I really do appreciate the sanctity of a private ballot,” Bright said Thursday. He said he is “leaning heavily against anything that would challenge the sanctity of the private ballot.”

Bright’s campaign received $10,000 in contributions from the UAW political action committee, but he said, “If they did, I’m not familiar with that.”

The House vote last year to pass the Employee Free Choice Act was 241 to 185.

When the new Congress meets in January, the bill is sure to get even more votes since the Nov. 4 elections expanded the Democratic majority.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not need Bright's vote to pass the bill, nor those of other Southern Democrats.

But it's the Senate where its fate will be decided. Last year, the bill fell nine votes short of getting a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

Then-senator Barack Obama voted to move ahead with the Employee Free Choice Act. No Democratic senators voted to block the bill; only one Republican, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, voted to advance it. In the vote next year, Republicans up for re-election in 2010, such as Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio will be under pressure to vote for it.

Sessions shudders at the thought that the bill will be passed year and be signed into law by Obama. “Card check would be unthinkable,” he said. “What I’m seeing with the good morale of the workers in Alabama, they don’t have to have a union to be well treated.”

The vote next year on the bill is one more reason why the still-undecided Senate elections in Georgia and Minnesota are so crucial.

The Georgia run-off election is Dec. 2, one week from next Tuesday. The Minnesota recount is under way and may be finished by Dec. 19.

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