Hi Nathan.

You may want to expand this a bit. The Freep link gives the (obviously false) factual basis for the suit (the false claim that card check constitutes pressure on the worker to sign), but does not give the legal claim on which it is based. What law or constitutional provision are they claim card check violates.

Secondly, what are there chances of winning? And what is the pressure point where activists can help fight this?

It's not only the right wing who are challenging neutrality agreements today (unless you consider the CNA to be right wing).

To understand what Mark is referring to, check out this article

Mark- That CNA might be trying to undermine card check agreements legally is the most henious thing possible. I have to check all the details and I have many friends at CNA but think they would be making a really nasty move lining up legally with rightwing union-busters on the issue. They would be asking the George W. Bush NLRB to rule in their favor-- which it may do in order to establish anti-union precedents that will kill a range of other organizing drives. I work day-to-day in this legal area and undermining the one tool that's helping unionize a lot of workers would betray the rest of the union movement-- yeah they may feel outmanuevered by rival SEIU but using rightwing Bush appointees to bail them out would be just a betrayal.

It's not a card-check neutrality agreement, but a neutrality agreement that provides for an election to accrete to an already existing bargaining unit. CNA is of course attacking SEIU and AFSCME from the left, accusing them of being de facto company unions. But much of their rhetoric criticizing SEIU and AFSCME's agreement with Tenet is strangely right-wing, indicating that there is something sacrosanct about the "choice" provided workers under an NLRB election. They would do themselves a favor to review the history of the Wagner Act -- elections under the NLRA were originially intended to determine *which* union would become the bargaining agent for a group of workers, not *if* workers were to have a union at all. But judge-made law perverted all that.

I didn't mean to imply that the CNA was making common cause with groups like the National Right to Work Committee, but I fear that if their suit to invalidate the "SEIU/Tenet backroom deal" prevails, it will set a precedent that would severely hinder extra-NLRB organizing.

The CNA has revealed itself to be a psychotic organization, preferring that those workers have no representative if it can't be CNA and trashing what little good labor law there is along the way. The CNA officials should be the pariahs of the labor movement, shunned at every opportunity.