Senators Talking Past Each Other in Labor Rules Changes Debate

The National Labor Relations Board, a Federal government agency, recently updated its rules concerning holding elections in businesses to determine whether or not their employees want to form a union and engage in collective bargaining with their employers.  It had been several years since any changes in the rules were made, and the stated aim of the revisions was to bring the Board's policies more in line with the computer technology so prevalent today in communications.  The Republican Party has taken issue with these changes, as I saw the other day in a US Senate debate on the subject (shown on TV's C-Span2).  Speaker after speaker, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would get up and refer to the actions as authorizing "ambush" elections with their new 11-day deadline for elections to be held once the employer is notified...and that something more reasonable like 30 days would be fair for both sides.  That sounds reasonable to me, but then the Democratic senators got up in opposition to the Republicans' proposed rescinding of these new rules and, instead of focusing on the new 11-day limit, kept going on and on about how important in this day and age unionizing elections need to be electronicized to keep up with how business is now almost universally done...and why do the Republicans oppose the newly-authorized use of e-mail and the Internet for this application?  They also repeatedly recited the history of the labor movement and emphasized how important collective bargaining had been for the growth of the American middle class in the last century...and how the National Labor Relations Board, begun under Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, was instrumental in ensuring a fair process.  Then Republican Senator Lamar Alexander got up and said no, that the new rules were against the middle class because it put the several hundred thousand franchise owners at a big disadvantage...with a different part of the rule changes that seemed to force the umbrella company to unionize if a smaller franchise site did.  H-m-m...

I'm no expert on government regulations and labor law...and I didn't read the proposed Republican Senate bill.  So I'm not in a position to judge the merits of these arguments, although I will say that in recent years, the Republican Party has become virulently anti-union and would like nothing better than to see all unions abolished and the organized labor movement destroyed.  But I do recognize when two sides in a debate are doing little other than talking past each other at the special interests to whom they are beholden.  It seems to me that with this proposed legislation, whose outcome I don't know about, it would have been better served going first to a Senate committee where the two sides could express their biggest objections and a compromise could have been reached that would have received enough votes to pass and get the President's signature...