August has turned out to be a stifling month for members of Congress. Those who have dared to venture into town hall meetings have been blown back by blasts of health care hot air.

On occasion, however, other issues have cropped up in constituent meetings. Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, has had a couple opportunities to address the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for workers to form unions.

During his town hall appearances—one at a conference of bloggers called Netroots Nation and another in Lebanon, Pennsylvania—Specter used a timeless political tactic. He told each audience what it wanted to hear while giving himself plenty of latitude.

Specter is a crucial EFCA vote. When he switched from the Republican to Democratic side of the aisle in April, speculation was rampant that he would provide the 60th vote to beat back the type of GOP filibuster that killed the measure in the previous Congress.

Instead, Specter maintained the opposition to EFCA that he announced when he was a Republican. Specter indicated that he was uncomfortable with a provision that would allow workers to authorize a union through majority sign-up instead of a secret-ballot election and another that would impose mandatory arbitration if first contract negotiations broke down.

Since Specter’s party switch, which occurred less than a month after EFCA was introduced, the measure has been stalled in Capitol Hill negotiations over a compromise. It’s not clear when—or whether—an alternative measure will emerge.

Several moderate Senate Democrats are resisting the bill over the so-called card-check provision and because they say it would impose increased costs on businesses trying to cope with the recession.

With EFCA in a precarious position, Specter’s comments before the Netroots Nation conference on August 14 took on added importance. He said that he would vote for cloture (i.e., to end a filibuster) on EFCA. A link to the video has been posted on ShopFloor.org, a blog sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers.

But what isn’t clear is whether Specter meant he would vote to end debate on EFCA as it was introduced, with the card-check and arbitration provisions, or a modified version of the bill, which he is helping negotiate.

The Specter press office hasn’t responded to my calls and e-mails for clarification. But I am pretty confident the senator meant that he would vote for cloture on a modified version. That makes perfect sense because he’s in the middle of those negotiations.

What Specter wanted to emphasize to the progressive online activists was that he was on their side on EFCA.

These folks, formerly known as liberals, are adamant about Democrats exercising their political strength and approving bills like EFCA, climate change legislation and health care reform.

They also might be inclined to support Specter’s Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Joe Sestak, who has co-sponsored EFCA. So, it’s natural that Specter told the bloggers what they wanted to hear.

But in a town hall meeting on August 11 in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Specter was confronted by an opponent of EFCA. Here’s the link to the YouTube video and the commentary on ShopFloor.org.

Here we see Specter siding with an EFCA opponent. Specter indicates that he is opposed to the card-check provision. He assures the questioner that a compromise involving shortening the union election time frame will not implement elections that occur so quickly that workers don’t understand the choice in front of them.

He also foreshadows a compromise on the arbitration provision.

“We tried to work through the other facet of it, arbitration for last-best offer, but we’re bearing in mind the concerns and worries that you raised,” Specter said.

The hints that Specter is dropping about an EFCA compromise aren’t assuaging the business community, which remains fiercely opposed to the bill.

“EFCA is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be improved,” says Keith Smith, director of employment and labor policy at NAM. “There can be no compromise.”

Smith says last-best-offer arbitration doesn’t allow labor and management to come to a mutual agreement on complicated issues.

“That really reduces the collective bargaining process to a game of Russian roulette,” Smith says.

While Specter and his colleagues continue their negotiations, neither side in the EFCA battle is letting up. Shortly after Labor Day, the pro-EFCA forces are planning to renew their push to move the measure up the crowded Senate calendar.

“We’re going to see a significant uptick in the campaign to generate support for the bill,” says Josh Goldstein, spokesman for American Rights at Work. The effort will include television ads, grass-roots events and Capitol Hill lobbying.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is charging ahead to defeat the bill. It has employed the same tactics as labor—TV ads, grass-roots mobilization and Capitol Hill “fly-ins” for its supporters.

Glenn Spencer, executive director of the chamber’s Workforce Freedom Initiative, says that the barrage will continue because only about one-third of the American public is aware of EFCA.

“The more they learn about it, the less and less they like it,” Spencer says.

The fate of EFCA is unclear. But it’s a certainty that Specter and his colleagues will continue to hear a lot about the measure this fall.

Discerning trends in the Capitol Hill agenda requires skill at reading between the lines.

But President Barack Obama made the timeline for immigration reform much clearer for us all in an August 10 press conference after a summit meeting with the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister.

Obama acknowledged that with health care reform slowing down, energy legislation looming in the Senate and financial regulation reform hovering in the wings, it will be impossible to pass an immigration bill this year.

“Now, I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s very important for us to sequence these big initiatives in a way where they don’t all just crash at the same time,” Obama said. “I would anticipate that before the year is out we will have draft legislation along with sponsors potentially in the House and the Senate who are ready to move this forward, and when we come back next year, that we should be in a position to start acting.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chair of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, will be the point person on immigration reform in Congress. He originally promised to produce a comprehensive bill by Labor Day. Now he has walked that back to offering a proposal sometime this fall.

“We’re making great progress,” he told reporters just before the Senate broke for its August recess. “I’m not setting any deadlines here.”

Employment verification will continue to twist in the wind because proponents of comprehensive reform want to save that chip for negotiations involving a path to citizenship for undocumented workers currently in the United States.

So, this fall, immigration action likely will revolve around employment verification. In September, the House and Senate must reconcile different versions of homeland security appropriations bills.

The Senate measure includes permanent reauthorization of E-Verify, the government-run electronic verification system reviled by many business groups. It also codifies a Department of Homeland Security regulation that requires all federal contractors to sign up for E-Verify.

Finally, the Senate bill would deny funding to the DHS to rescind a regulation on Social Security no-match letters that could force employers to fire workers whose information on earnings reports doesn’t align with that in government databases.

There’s a lot to sort out in the homeland appropriations legislation, but not nearly as much as in health care reform. Both the House and Senate missed their goals of passing health care bills before the summer break.

That pushes the big battles into the fall. On your scorecard, note that the most important action will occur in the Senate Finance Committee. For now, it is looking like the last hope for a bipartisan bill.

Three Democrats, led by the panel’s chairman, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, and three Republicans, led by the ranking Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, have been working for weeks on a bill. Grinding out consensus means that controversial provisions—such as a public insurance option and an employer mandate—will likely fall by the wayside.

But such an outcome will enrage liberal Democrats who have staked their claim in health care reform on establishing a public option—and, to a lesser extent, an employer mandate—like the ones in House legislation and the measure produced by Senate health committee.

The business community is hoping for the bipartisan negotiations in the Senate to produce a palatable bill.

“The Finance Committee is closer to getting it right than any other plan that exists right now,” said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a group representing chief executives of some of the largest U.S. corporations. “If they are successful, will the president support their version of reform?”

That’s probably the most important question in the health care debate. Those participating in the negotiations were optimistic but circumspect before the Senate headed home for August.

“We’re making steady progress and doing this in a very professional way,” said Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota.

Finally, in negotiations on another bill important to Workforce Management readers, the principals aren’t providing much guidance on developments. The Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to form unions, has been stalled for months because of a lack of support among moderate Democrats in the Senate.

Schumer also is a player on this bill. He is one of the senators trying to negotiate a compromise that will satisfy his colleagues who believe that the bill would hurt businesses struggling to survive the recession.

“There’s a group of people working on it, and we’re making great progress,” Schumer said.

Reading between the lines, it looks as if predictions that the Senate won’t act on EFCA this year may be right. But keep an eye on the measure. The exhilarating and frustrating thing about Capitol Hill is that conventional wisdom is consistently overturned.

Whenever President Barack Obama talks about the American people being ready to address a contentious issue, brace yourself. It usually means that he’s thinking in philosophical terms without committing to any details on areas where the real battles are waged.

Exhorting Congress to get the job done without providing specific direction has contributed to rising tension over health care reform. Look for more of the same on immigration.

As was the case with health care, early signals are bright on immigration. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, has vowed to introduce in September a comprehensive reform bill that would crack down on illegal immigration and create a path to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the country.

At a July 21 hearing, Schumer outlined a 10-point rubric for an electronic employment verification system that would include a biometric dimension to eliminate identity fraud. He got a couple amens from the Republican side of the aisle.

Schumer wants to overhaul the existing, government-run verification mechanism, E-Verify, which he calls “an example of a halfhearted and flawed system.”

Two days after Schumer’s hearing, Rep. Heath Shuler, D-North Carolina, reintroduced a bill that would expand E-Verify and make it permanent. The Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement Act almost got enough support last year to force a vote on the House floor over the wishes of Democratic leadership.

It looks as if the bill has momentum again this year, with 77 bipartisan co-sponsors already on board. It will compete for the hearts and minds of lawmakers with a measure backed by the Society for Human Resource Management that would build a verification system alternative to E-Verify.

Shuler wants to bolster work-site and border enforcement before Congress takes up a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Schumer seeks to do everything in a comprehensive bill.

“It’s the only way you’re going to get it done,” Schumer says.

The ranking Republican on the subcommittee, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asserts that employment verification must “be done first” in the journey to comprehensive immigration reform.

“I’m agnostic whether it has to be one bill or not,” Cornyn says.

But Capitol Hill liberals don’t temporize about sequence. Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus want all elements of immigration reform—addressing illegal immigrants already in the country and enforcement—tackled at once.

“The end of illegal immigration is only possible through effective employment verification as part of comprehensive immigration reform,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, testified at Schumer’s hearing.
 
Conservative Democrats are splitting from liberals on a major issue. Sound familiar? It may become similar to the fight that has broken out in health care reform over the House Blue Dog Democrats’ effort to achieve more savings in the House measure. 

While the verification battle is simmering, the Obama administration is making E-Verify the foundation of its crackdown on employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. The Department of Homeland Security touts the system’s effectiveness and says it is working to correct the identity fraud problem.

“The system has made dramatic improvements in reliability,” says Michael Aytes, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “That’s not really an argument at this point against the system.”

Elsewhere on Capitol Hill, negotiators are trying to reconcile two homeland security appropriations bills that include different timelines for extending the E-Verify program.

It will take presidential leadership to sort out the swirl of employment verification activity. Obama will have to let Congress—especially his own party—know how he wants to proceed in order to avoid a breakdown like the one we’re seeing in health care reform.

Immigration advocates celebrated a White House meeting on Thursday, June 25, between President Barack Obama and more than two dozen bipartisan members of Congress.

“My administration is fully behind an effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform,” Obama said after emerging from the get-together.

It’s difficult to imagine that an issue as complex as immigration can be completed this year, when Congress has its hands full with health care and energy legislation, not to mention routine but big issues like appropriations and a Supreme Court nomination.

More important, the political fissures that caused the ground to crumble under immigration reform in 2007 still exist today, even though Republicans are in a much weaker position on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York and chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, intends to move a bill this year, but it may not be completed until next year.

In a speech on June 24, Schumer laid out seven principles for immigration reform. His call for a biometric employment verification system has drawn the most attention. But No. 6 on the list is also important to business.

“No immigration system would be worthwhile if it is unable to attract the best and brightest minds of the world to come to the United States and create jobs for Americans—as has been the case for Yahoo, Google, Intel, eBay and countless other companies,” he said.

But he also warned that the U.S. immigration system cannot encourage “underpaid, temporary workers from taking jobs that could and should be filled by qualified American workers.”

Threading the needle will be difficult. Some immigration advocates want to create a commission to do the job by controlling the flow of foreign workers.

The American Council on International Personnel opposes the idea and has issued its own set of principles for immigration reform.

Employers that belong to ACIP have at least 500 employees and operations in at least two countries. At the top of ACIP’s immigration reform wish list is what it calls a “trusted employer registration program” that would allow companies that play by immigration rules to have “timely, predictable and efficient access to visas for foreign professionals.”

What ACIP doesn’t want is an immigration commission determining whether international candidates can fill positions at U.S. companies. Such a bureaucracy won’t be able to discern the needs of a particular company or industry, it argues.

“How are they going to do these micro, micro, micro determinations?” asked Austin Fragomen Jr., managing partner at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy in New York and chair of the ACIP board, at a recent ACIP conference in Arlington, Virginia.

The organizations that participated in the ACIP meeting—including Oracle and Intel—seek to hire the best possible talent to maintain their competitive edge in the marketplace, regardless of where the talent was born. They argue that the United States should keep foreign national students in the country after they’ve graduated with science and technical degrees from U.S. universities.

They are wary of being hamstrung by legislation such as a bill introduced by Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois, and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that would tighten requirements on H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants.

More than 75 percent of the postdoctoral degree scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, are foreign nationals, according to Thomas Barnett, director of the organization’s international office.

“We just don’t have enough quality in the math and science areas in this country,” Barnett said.

Democrats and Republicans alike might take umbrage when companies assert that the best talent in a global economy may come from other parts of the globe—and they should be free to make those hires.

Barnett has an answer ready: “Senator or congressman, tell me what you have done lately to improve education in your state.”

A two-week congressional recess hasn’t cooled the embers of the political fire generated by a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize.

While they’re at home, senators and members of Congress have been the targets of a grass-roots campaign by the AFL-CIO promoting the Employee Free Choice Act. The union says the outreach involves thousands of workers in 350 events in at least 10 states.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has launched a $1 million television ad campaign in five states designed to denounce the bill and persuade wavering senators to oppose it.

As the EFCA cage match gets bloodier, it looks as if another issue might cause a labor-management brawl. And it’s one of the few areas where the two groups have been unusually cooperative in recent years—immigration.

On Tuesday, April 14, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win released five principles for immigration reform. The framework is significant because it symbolizes labor unity on the issue, especially the guest-worker dimension that split the movement in 2007.

This development could add further momentum to what immigration reform supporters hope will be a concerted Obama administration effort to pass a comprehensive bill this year.

One proposal by the labor groups is to establish “an independent commission to assess and manage future [immigration] flows, based on labor market shortages that are determined on the basis of actual need.”

The business community is wary of allocating employment visas through such a commission. Dan Yager, chief policy officer at the HR Policy Association in Washington, told The Wall Street Journal: “I think that’s just a way to avoid having a guest-worker program, and our view is that there is definitely a need for that.”

But in other areas, business and labor are on the same page—such as the need to overhaul the employment verification system and to create a path toward legal residency for the 12 million undocumented workers currently in the United States.

Both sides also should agree that immigrant workers must be treated fairly.

“Having access to a large undocumented workforce has allowed employers to create an underground economy, without the basic protections afforded to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents,” the immigration framework states. “An inclusive, practical and swift adjustment of status program will raise labor standards for all workers.”

During a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates, I saw a region that is dependent on foreign labor. Everywhere you turn in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there’s a building going up. On my first look around, I understood the joke that the crane is the UAE national bird.

The thousands of people toiling on the construction projects are from somewhere else—India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or other countries in the region. None of them has UAE citizenship.

That situation could foster abuse. In fact, while I was in the UAE, the British Broadcasting Corp. aired a documentary asserting that guest laborers are exploited.

I didn’t see mistreatment myself. But I did notice the forlorn expressions on workers at a project near the Dubai hotel where I was staying. They were in line for fruit being passed out during a break.

Although having a job in the UAE may be better than unemployment at home, life is a struggle in their adopted country. They are sacrificing so that rich Emiratis—and international tourists—can enjoy gleaming hotels, office buildings, marinas and shopping malls.

For a brief moment, I felt a twinge of moral superiority, convinced that we don’t treat foreign workers this way in the United States.

But then I remembered that some nefarious American employers take advantage of Mexican immigrants. Wealthy suburbanites in the Washington area sometimes fail to pay Guatemalan day laborers—or even give them a ride back to the place where they were picked up in the morning.

While campaigning last fall, President Barack Obama touted his skill at fostering consensus on tough issues. He hasn’t demonstrated that ability in office so far. But perhaps he will find a way to bring labor and management together to ensure that the U.S. meets a higher immigration standard than the rest of the world.