In the last few days, the Economic Freedom Alliance (EFA) has created a website and placed billboards in Indiana pressuring Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) to vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFA, which is composed of a variety of business organizations located in the Midwest, claims that its purpose is to make Congress “feel the pressure from our central message about the harmful effect that radical organized labor proposals in Congress will have on job creation in the Midwest”:

[T]he absence of a hard-hitting, district-focused campaign leaves a serious gap in that overall effort. EFA is not encumbered by the need for political correctness and hence its response can be better positioned to fill the critical messaging void in overall Card Check opposition campaign.

Evidently, EFA is also not encumbered by a need to adhere to the facts, as its website is claiming that the Employee Free Choice Act will “cost the U.S. economy 600,000 jobs in 2010,” which is a statistic taken from a thoroughly discredited study by business sponsored scholar Anne Layne-Farrar. As the Institute for Southern Studies put it, “even as a piece of business research-for-hire, Layne-Farrar’s study is shockingly weak — based on a thin set of old and irrelevant data that doesn’t even bear out her own conclusions.”

But EFA’s disclosure and expenditure form provides some insight into why it’s comfortable parading out false talking points. After all, the EFA has paid $100,000 in consulting fees to Karl Rove and Co this year.

This $20,000 fee was paid every month this year, February through June. And given Rove’s penchant for falsehoods, it’s no surprise that EFA has gone down the same road. EFA has also given $5000 to astroturf group Americans for Prosperity to “reimburse for event expense” (with Prosperity misspelled as “Properity” on the disclosure form).

Currently, due to a legal loophole, Federal Express is allowed to operate under the Railway Labor Act, instead of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that governs other companies like UPS. And as the Washington Times reported today, there is a battle brewing between FedEx and UPS, while Congress considers a change that would pull FedEx under the NLRA.

The Railway Labor Act “poses huge barriers to organizing” compared to the NLRA, and thus FedEx is not very pleased about the prospect of a change:

“We are an airline; [UPS] are a trucking outfit,” said FedEx spokesman Maury Lane. “You can’t put stop signs at 30,000 feet.”

But this is about more than just unionization. FedEx’s resistance to the change is consistent with its strategy of doing all that it can to avoid treating its drivers fairly.

For instance, FedEx constantly misclassifies its drivers as independent contractors, placing them outside of the protection of most labor and employment laws. As American Rights at Work pointed out, “by classifying nearly 15,000 drivers as independent contractors rather than employees, FedEx Ground lowers its labor costs by avoiding payroll taxes and benefits.” Its drivers are responsible for fuel and maintenance of the trucks, and are not provided with paid vacation or sick leave.

Misclassification can ultimately save employers “upwards of 30% of their payroll costs.” And because the drivers are not technically employees, they are barred from unionizing.

FedEx claims that its model “works for the company, the contractors and the customers.” But last week, U.S. District Judge Robert Miller granted a request to bring a class action suit against FedEx, by drivers “who claim they deserve benefits because the company treats them as full-time workers by mandating their clothing, hours and prices.”

In a previous ruling in a similar case, the California Superior Court decided that FedEx drivers were indeed full employees, and that FedEx’s driver agreements constitute “a brilliantly drafted contract creating the constraints of an employment relationship…in the guise of an independent contractor model.” So FedEx needs to do much better than cry “we are an airline” (whose pilots, incidentally, are represented by the Airline Pilots Association) to justify its treatment of its drivers and its resistance to fair labor law.

The top coal lobbying coalition in Washington, D.C. hid its knowledge of “fraudulent grassroots lobbying” while Congress voted against clean energy legislation on June 26, 2009. A background document from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) reveals that it learned two days before the vote on Waxman-Markey that Bonner & Associates had sent a dozen forged letters opposing the American Clean Energy and Security Act to at least three members of the House of Representatives:

Due to reported misconduct by a Bonner and Associates employee (who the firm states was subsequently fired), it appears that a total of twelve falsified letters were sent by that firm to the offices of Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, Congressman Christopher Carney and Congressman Tom Perriello.

Based upon information ACCCE received from the Hawthorn Group, it was Bonner and Associates’ own internal process that identified these falsified letters and it was Mr. Bonner who first brought this to the attention of the Hawthorn Group. ACCCE was then made aware of the situation by Hawthorn on June 24, 2009.

Two of the three members targeted by ACCCE — Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-PA) and Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA) — voted against the bill on June 26th. However, despite its knowledge of this potentially criminal fraud, ACCCE said nothing until Rep. Perriello’s hometown paper, the Charlottesville Daily Progress, broke the story more than a month later on July 31st. On August 3rd, ACCCE released a statement that they were “outraged by the conduct of Bonner and Associates.”

Mirroring arguments made in the forged letters, Dahlkemper argued that “hardworking families simply cannot afford the additional costs that this legislation would impose on them” and Carney attacked the bill for “burdening hard-working Americans with a tax increase and without passing along increased energy bills to consumers.”

ACCCE, which spent $10.5 million last year lobbying Congress against mandatory limits on coal’s global warming pollution, refuses to admit which grassroots organizations in Pennsylvania were the victims of fraud in the letters sent to Dahlkemper and Carney.