Employee Free Choice Act

What do US union members think about it? Is it a necessary incremental step forward, or does the power it puts into the hands of the NLRB make it not worth it?

Wikipedia is the best I can do with that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Free_Choice_Act

Basically it will make unionization with a simple card check/secret ballot only require a simple majority of 51% rather than the 2/3's majority currently necessary. If you can't get the 2/3s, you are thrown into a huge legal mess that usually slows the unionization process by years, and gives employers time to weed out problem elements.

The down side from a class struggle perspective is that it essentially puts the initial contract negotiations into the hands of the NLRB. If both parties can't come to an agreement for their initial contract, a federal arbitration board will force both employers and employees into a binding agreement that will be good for 2 years I believe. In practice, what this means is that for the initial contract negotiation, employees will be giving up their right to strike for a better contract, since the federal arbitration board is binding legally.

While that aspect is entirely negative, from my limited experience with unions, a broader unionization drive is necessary before we will see broad effective striking for increased benefits and labor rights. For example, with my union, going on strike is extremely difficult because there is a massive surplus of nonunion labor that contractors can pull from. We need to work on getting these shops unionized before we can have the strength to increase our demands.

Do other people have similar experiences?

Given union density in the USA, anything that increases the ease of collective bargaining recognition is a step forward. I've organized in NLRB elections as well as non-NLRB processes; the former are invariably a lot harder to win representation. As far as the injection of the NLRB as arbitrator in the first contract negotiations, all I can say is that first contracts usually suck regardless. Incidently if the bosses did not fear card check, they would not be spending millions in advertising on CNN, MSN, and (of course) Fox to pre-empt the discussion into one of employee "privacy" rights.

I'm not sure about this. It's a small step forward, but could wind up being bad, since the NLRB has always been stacked.

Did you have the impression that "legal" union processes were not already under the NLRB? Are you writing from the USA, comrade?

My understanding is that the NLRB is shit largely because the courts have stymied its operations, and that it's mostly the upper mucky-mucks that are stacked fools. I know a few former lower-to-mid level NLRB folks that do the bulk of the grunt work, and they say that career NLRB types are quite pro-labor.