Weekend Question 2: What’s Wrong with Allowing ‘Card-Check’ in Union Drives?

ANSWER: It depends on whether you believe in free, fair, and secret-ballot elections. If you do, “card-check” is a disaster.

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This issue was mentioned here a couple of months ago, and deserves to be brought up again.

Thomas Bray succinctly stated what it’s all about in his Thursday OpinionJournal.com column:

….. not-so-Big Labor, which has dumped millions into organizing campaigns without much success, is scrambling for new ways to beef up its membership rolls. The latest hot idea is “card check,” in which unions demand to be recognized as the bargaining unit for a workplace if a majority of the workers merely sign a card indicating their support. Under current law, companies are required to recognize a union only after a secret ballot of the workers–and unions have been losing an increasing number of those elections.

….. Sen. Kennedy, whose bill is titled the Employee Free Choice Act, claims federal card check legislation “would level the playing field” by removing “large loopholes” in existing labor laws that supposedly allow employers to fire union organizers and intimidate workers prior to organizing elections. Union officials like Stewart Acuff, the AFL-CIO’s organizing director, complain that elections “just don’t work.”

But it’s more than a bit odd for union leaders, long proponents of what they are pleased to call “industrial democracy,” to object to the secret ballot. As for Sen. Kennedy’s claim that he merely seeks a choice for workers between card-check and a traditional ballot, imagine you are Joe Lunch Bucket on your way to work. A beefy organizer greets you at the plant gate and asks you to sign a card in favor of representation by a union. Are you really going to say no?

The fact that unions now call card-check their No. 1 legislative priority should be seen as a sign of weakness rather than strength.

The final statement from the excerpt is so true. The union movement should be able to organize via secret ballot. Workers in a few industries I can think of right away would actually benefit from being organized. The mystery is why organizers can’t make their case. Please don’t tell me it’s intimidation by employers; in most circumstances, their human-resource employees or advisers are not counseling aggressive opposition (unless attempts at treating people well count as that).

There is one reason why organizing drives aren’t cutting it that is becoming self-inflicted, and is a total mystery to me. I don’t understand why the unions don’t realize that their recent embrace of illegal immigration is undermining their attempt to organize the industries that would be the best candidates for unionization. They don’t understand why people might be reluctant to embrace a union when there is so much underpriced competition, legal and otherwise, out there. And they can’t seriously believe that unionizing illegal workers is a winning strategy — can they?

Speaking of mysteries: Why would the party of Taft-Hartley acquiesce in such an obviously undemocratic exercise as card-checkoff? Giving in, which some observers believe may happen, would be a sellout of historic and monumental proportions.

There’s a reason a secret ballot is secret. Sometimes the employer has the coercive hand; sometimes union organizers do. The secret ballot means that neither hand gets to guide the hand the employee uses to casts his or her ballot.