Employee Free Choice: 'A Necessary Response to Economic Crisis'

A member of the President-elect's transition team said the Employee Free Choice Act is a necessary response to the "worst economic crisis in our lifetime." The speaker, Thomas Kochan, co-director of MIT's Institute of Technology Workplace Center and Institute for Work and Employment Research, said the legislation was the "necessary first step" to reducing the highly adversarial roles of labor and management and creating an "integrated, progressive labor policy coordinated with economic policy."

"We need an integrated strategy to boost economic performance and tap the skills and knowledge of workers," Kochan said in an address at a labor law seminar sponsored by the Center for Labor and Employment Law at New York University. "We can't get there with a highly adversarial labor-management relationship." Kochan dismissed criticism that the measure's mandatory arbitration provision would undercut the collective bargaining process, pointing out that mandatory arbitration has existed for decades in the public sector with no harm to the bargaining process.