Rathke on organizing

Acorn founder Wade Rathke has posted three interesting and insightful posts about the new NLRB election rules, here, here, and here. In his first post he correctly sets out the passage to approval and predicts accurately the legal challenges and time table (years). Although he understates the effect of quicker elections, I think he's close predicting that the time for elections will be reduced from 40 plus days to 15-20. I think he also underestimates the benefit of the changes for labor. In the second post he assesses the new rules in the context of large units, very interesting read for employers. He is correct about the proper response of management, more effort at the initial discovery of union activity, less assessment before acting and a rush to an all out war strategy. This will be the new face of union avoidance - at least by those who understand effective strategy. In an interesting take, Rathke argues unions will have to work hard on pre-election stipulations in order to avoid post election challenges that may delay certification. As this post-election problem sinks in, Rathke in his final post talks about the union maintaining its support by engaging in organizational and protected concerted activities to allow a prolonged post election process to diminish its appeal. This later concern faces the reality that unlike EFCA, which would have forced first contracts, there is nothing the NLRB can do by rule making to change the NLRA to force an employer to agree to specific terms in contract negotiation.