This morning the Democratic National Committee announced that its 2012 convention will be held in Charlotte, NC. North Carolina has another distinction: it’s the least union state in the country, with just 3.2% of its workers belonging to a union (coming behind even Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi). And the DNC’s host city of Charlotte has exactly 0 (zero) union hotels in which the 15,000+ visitors will stay for the convention. Finally, the host venue in Charlotte, the Time Warner Cable Arena, does not appear to have any union workers.

About two dozen people milled about the lobby of the Westin St. Francis before breaking into a choreographed song-and-dance adaptation of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, called “Don’t Get Caught in a Bad Hotel.” The activists, organized by San Francisco Pride at Work and other local groups, combined a dancing chorus with a small marching band in an impressive performance that urged visitors to “boycott, boycott, boycott this hotel” because “workers rights are hot.”

The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) over the course of the past year and a half has been largely determined by the White House. Rahm Emanuel would not let it come up for a vote until after health care was passed, and by that time the Democrats no longer had 60 votes in the Senate. But its evolution is also intimately tied to the electoral prospects of Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, and unless you understand one, you can’t understand the other.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, got himself arrested along with dozens of workers boycotting the Hilton San Francisco.