Union organizers never, ever intimidate workers whom they are
trying to recruit. Believe me? Great! I’ve got a bridge to sell
you. Sound crass? Well, Big Labor and their allies in Congress are
trying to sell America just such a proverbial bridge — the
deceivingly named Employee Free Choice Act (pdf) (H.R. 800,
S.1041), on which the Senate will soon vote.
The Democrats owe their majority in Congress in part to
organized labor’s contributions — both cash in in-kind activism
and get-out-the vote efforts. Now the unions want their pound of
flesh, and no item is more important to them than the EFCA.
Why does Big Labor have so much riding on this bill? Because it
would mandate an organizing method known as “card check” whenever a
union requests it. Facing a decades-old membership decline in the
private sector, unions have sought other organizing strategies, and
“card check” has been among the most effective.
Traditionally, unions tried to organize workplaces through
secret ballot elections supervised by the National Labor Relations
Board. But in recent years unions have been winning only about half
of the elections they hold, so now they’re trying to change the
rules.
Card check circumvents secret ballot elections because it
requires only that a majority of employees sign cards showing that
they support union representation. Employees are often urged to
sign cards publicly and in the presence of union organizers, which
exposes them to high-pressure tactics which the secret ballot is
designed to avoid.
Moreover, when an employer agrees to a card check procedure, it
enters into a “neutrality” agreement with the union — which isn’t
neutral at all. Under a neutrality agreement, an employer agrees
not to campaign against union representation during a union
organizing drive. Thus, the union enjoys an advantage because the
employer agrees to remain silent.
But if card check “neutrality” is so lopsided in favor of the
union, why would any employer agree to it? To stave off union
attacks. To get employers to agree to a card check procedure,
unions often resort to what is known as a “corporate campaign.”
Corporate campaigns are elaborate political and public relations
campaigns that labor unions use to target a specific employer or
group of employers. The union doesn’t simply picket the employer.
Its tactics include feeding allegations of company wrongdoing to
the news media, filing complaints with regulatory agencies, and
enlisting allies, such as liberal church groups or environmental
activists, to publicly denounce the company. The message to the
employer is simple: Allow us to unionize your workforce or we
will destroy your reputation.
Current federal law allows employers to insist on a secret
ballot election. But the EFCA would do away with that
Senate Republicans may kill it through filibuster. President
George W. Bush has threatened to veto the bill. But even if it goes
down to defeat this time, expect it to come back in future
Congresses — especially if in 2008 the Democrats gain the White
House, seats in the Senate, or both.
We’ve seen this before — Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the
current bill’s sponsor, the bill was introduced unsuccessfully in
the last Congress. He won’t take a “no” as final this time,
either.
Ironically, Miller was one of 16 members of Congress who
wrote (pdf) to a state labor arbitration board
urging it to respect the secret ballot as “absolutely necessary in
order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a
union they might not otherwise choose.” Great, you say? Yes, except
that the state in question is the State of Puebla — in Mexico.
Apparently secret ballot elections are good enough for Mexican
workers but not American ones.
How does card-check work in practice? Consider the
testimony (pdf) before House Education and Labor committee of
Jennifer Jason, a former union organizer for the hospitality and
textile union UNITE-HERE, who left that job in disgust at what she
called other organizers’ “disgraceful practices”:
A “card check” campaign begins with union organizers
going to the homes of workers over a weekend, a tactic called
“house calling,” with the sole intent of having those workers sign
authorization cards…
In most cases, the workers have no idea that there is a union
campaign underway. Organizers are taught to play upon this element
of surprise to get “into the door.”…The goal of the organizer is
to quickly establish a trust relationship with the worker, move
from talking about what their job entails to what they would like
to change about their job, agitate them by insisting that
management won’t fix their workplace problems without a union and
finally convincing the worker to sign a card….
Typically, if a worker signed a card, it had nothing to do with
whether a worker was satisfied with the job or felt they were
treated fairly by his or her boss. I found that most often it was
the skill of the organizer to create issues from information the
organizer had extracted from the worker during the “probe” stage of
the house call…
I began to realize that the number of cards that were signed had
less to do with support for the union and more to do with the
effectiveness of the organizer speaking to the workers.
This appears to be consistent with results of secret ballot
elections that are conducted in which workers are able to vote and
make their final decision free from manipulation, intimidation or
pressure tactics from either side.
From my experience, the number of cards signed appear to have
little relationship to the ultimate vote count…The time allocated
for the election to go forward allows the worker a chance to think
through his or her own issues without undue influence — thus
avoiding an immediate, impulsive decision based on little or no
fact.
Now Big Labor and their politician allies are trying to push a
similar snake-oil sales tactic on the American public — rushing
the EFCA through Congress before, to paraphrase Jason, most
Americans realize there’s a union power grab under way.
