Question: Q: Obama's Welcome Silence On The Employee Free Choice Act

Just about a year ago today, candidate Barack Obama received a full-throated endorsement from Andy Stern, the savvy and aggressive president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for his unstinting support of labor-backed initiatives in both the Illinois and U.S. Senate.

In part, Stern's endorsement has paid off with a presidential boost of two ill-advised labor measures, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. But for Stern and the SEIU the real political payoff was supposed to come from the passage of the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.

Without doubt, the EFCA would introduce the most avulsive change in labor law since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which made mandatory collective bargaining between management and labor the law of the land.

Today President Obama, who has moved hard on many fronts, has maintained a wise and judicious silence on the EFCA. Thankfully, the current bill has garnered somewhat less political support in Congress than it did a year ago when it sailed through the House only to die for the want of 60 votes in the Senate.

In principle, I believe that the NLRA is manifestly inferior to the common law system of open contract that it displaced. One of its chief weaknesses, most evident in bad economic times, is that the rigidity of collective bargaining agreements hampers any much-needed downward adjustments in wages and benefits. That rigidity in turn has led to the hemorrhaging of jobs in the unionized part of the automotive industry.

EFCA does not address job losses in unionized industries. Instead, it hopes to promote union organization by two key steps that in fact pose a mortal threat to the job creation so desperately needed today. No economic wizardry is needed to recognize that the more costly it is to create jobs, the fewer the jobs will be created.

Unfortunately, EFCA is a job killer of the first magnitude, as I have shown in an extensive monograph funded--full disclosure--by the Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs.

EFCA's first mistake is to adopt a card-check system that allows a union to sidestep at will any secret ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board. Today, that election takes place only after a highly regulated political campaign in which both the employer and dissident workers have their say about the proposed union. Today, unions win about as many of these elections as they lose. And they often lose because the campaign points out the dangers that unions pose to firm growth and worker job security.

Under EFCA, however, the union is certified so long as it gathers, even in secret, cards signed by a majority of workers. The ability of workers to hear both sides is effectively throttled. The union may keep the signed cards even if workers ask for them back. EFCA does nothing to guard against the evident risks of intimidation and misrepresentation by such simple safeguards as card notarization.

The harm from the deeply unpopular card check is compounded by an untested and convoluted process of compulsory interest arbitration that kicks in only 10 days after the union is certified. In those negotiations, the union has the huge advantage of surprise.

If the parties fail to reach an agreement after 90 days of private negotiation, followed by 30 days with a mediator, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in the Department of Labor will, under rules yet to be determined, issue a decree that binds both sides for two years, politely described as a "first contract" period. Contract has nothing to do with it. Worker ratification is not required for the decree to be binding, and the employer cannot challenge the decree's terms in any court.

I have never met any neutral person, liberal or conservative, who has not visibly winced when told what the EFCA provides. I have argued in the Wall Street Journal that the EFCA violates constitutional guarantees of speech, association and property, and will not stop to respond to the misguided criticismof my position here. Let's hope the EFCA never gets to the point where it faces a constitutional fight.

Right now, President Obama seems to have prudently realized he cannot maintain any bipartisan support if he tries to force the EFCA into law over the fierce and unrelenting opposition of the entire business community. He's right. This nation cannot endure the successive haymakers of card check and compulsory arbitration into the private sector.

How ironic! A libertarian who believes staunchly in freedom of contract in employment markets becomes, in these hard political times, a stalwart defender of the NLRA, warts and all. The Congress and the president should do likewise.

Richard A. Epstein is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, The University of Chicago; the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, and a visiting professor at New York University Law School, who has just written the Case Against the Employer Free Choice Act, to be published shortly by the Hoover Press.
What are the most important parts of this text?

A: The president checks himself on card checks.


Q: Australian astronomers capture live alien radio bursts

The latest case in extraterrestrial communication might inspire an episode on the "X-Files" reboot.

A group of Australian astronomers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne captured the world's first live alien radio burst.

Emily Petroff, lead scientist of the Swinburne team, said the capturing of the radio waves could help astronomers understand alien phenomenon.

"This makes the discovery so exciting," Petroff told Yahoo News. "Because we were able to catch the act, as opposed to existing data sets, we were able to reveal that the radiation produced by FRB (fast radio burst) was more than 20% circularly polarized and this suggests there were strong magnetic fields near the source."

The radio bursts, which are only as long as a blink of an eye, were detected by the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales.

The Parkes telescope had already captured a radio burst in 2007, but those wave signals weren't live, they were discovered through archived data.

Petroff said the radio burst waves don't have an origin yet, but experts believe the source had to be cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years away.

"There are two competing models to explain the phenomenon," Petroff told News Corp. "One suggests it is caused by the collapse or explosion of a star in another galaxy, while the other suggests it comes from some sort of energy flaring from a neutron star."

Although most experts say a star might have emitted the bursts, Petroff said that either theory could be incorrect and that it could be something entirely different that sent those burst waves.
What are the most important parts of this text?

A:
Answer: A group of Australian astronomers captured the world's first live extraterrestrial radio burst with Parkes radio telescope.