The 'Human Monster' Rick Berman Is At It Again

The man whose very son called him "despicable" and a "human molestor," labor antagonist Rick Berman, is spreading the word again--the word against the EFCA, Employee Free Choice Act. At least he's come up with interesting anti-EFCA studies, though one can never know the extent of the bias (if any) built into these things. First, he cites Princeton economist David Lee, who studied the effect of unionization on companies' stock valuations. According to Berman, Lee found “substantial losses in market value following a union election victory--about a 10 percent decline, equivalent to about $40,500 per unionized worker.” Should EFCA pass, the Human Molestor concludes, "Lee’s data suggest that the market value of firms will decline by as much as 11 percent." The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which he also cites, chimes in that EFCA will cost the nation 600,000 jobs in the first year. Here's more labor molestation:

In a 2002 study, economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway calculated the burden that labor unions had on American economic productivity. They found that between 1947 and 2000, 'the economic cost of unions' in cumulating lost income, investment, and output was $73 trillion. That’s more than the gross world product last year.

Dunno, but that sounds awfully inflated or made up to me, and I'm no fan of the EFCA. Berman gets in some licks of his own, of course, but he doesn't reveal his source when he claims that the top ten most unionized states achieved just two-thirds the job growth of the top ten least unionized states from 1997-2007. This is all good stuff in the arsenal of weapons to be used against the EFCA, but I doubt any Democrats will be listening in Congress. Are you listening, filibuster-killer Arlen Specter?