Nancy Pelosi promises that among Congress's other orders of business in the Spring, they will "certainly ... be passing the card check, the Employee Free Choice Act."

As it stands, union organizers get employees to sign a whole bunch of cards and then force an election among the employees to see if they want a union. If the bill passes, the election step can be skipped-- a majority of card-checks and the employer is automatically required to recognize the union.

Leaving aside whether one thinks it is fair for a majority of workers to force the employer to bargain with the lot of trem only through a union, my girlfriend tells me that this is a big deal for unions. Here are the texts of H.R.1696 and S.842, the current proposed bills.

Incidentally, I wonder-- if one is trying to promote workplace democracy-- whether it makes sense to make it harder to avoid workplace elections rather than easier. What if all workplaces, every year, automatically had an election to see if they wanted a union? No petitions, no waivers, just every year some Department of Labor officials would come through and run a quick secret ballot poll. [There are obviously several possibly schemes to deal with competing unions. I think ideally each union would get a "yes or no" vote, and if any union got more than half the vote, then the union with the most votes would win.] This would deprive both unions and employers of the chance to strategize and scheme about the timing of elections, would provide regular information value to both sides, and decrease the need for affirmative "organization" of workers. After all, we hold legislative elections (and most local elections) every fixed term of years whether people want them or not, and that seems to work remarkably well.

I really liked this profile of poetry critic Helen Vendler. This is the right attitude for any poetry scholar:

Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school of one, an impassioned aesthete who pays minute attention to the structures and words that are a poet’s genetic code.

“If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts” — as Kafka and (by legend) Virgil did — “they should,” Vendler insisted. “I think the ‘Aeneid’ should have been burned and Kafka’s works should have been burned, because personal fidelity is more important than art,” she said in her quiet, direct manner.