Sam Stein uncovers the painful truth for Big Labor: its biggest problem with the Employee Free Choice Act isn’t the Republicans — it is Red State Democrats. It is one thing to be generically for “helping employees organize”; it is quite another to hold the decisive votes in a now well-publicized measure to strip employees of the secret ballot in the workplace.

Unmentioned in the article are certain Red State Democrats in right-to-work states. There’s Mark Warner and Jim Webb in Virginia, who have heretofore been supportive of Big Labor’s biggest legislative agenda item. But when Andy Stern declares that after the EFCA he’s going after right-to-work states in the south and southeast (“In a post-Employee Free Choice Act world, we would go where no one else wants to go, which is the south and Southwest”), these and other senators may be thinking twice about embracing an agenda that is so unpopular at home and has galvanized opposition from business groups whose support these moderate Democrats had relied upon.

When it’s time to decide on the EFCA vote, I’d imagine the Red State Democrats, especially those who are up for re-election in 2010 (Bayh, Bennet, Dorgan, Lincoln) will likely say, “Maybe later.”