The Circuitous Game Of Card Check
Earnings of America’s blue collar working class has lost ground in recent years because of a variety of factors, one of which is the decline of organized labor as the nation shifts from a manufacturing to a service-oriented economy.
To reverse this trend, President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, labor leaders and a Democratic-controlled Congress are pushing for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act — also known as “card check.”
It is akin to a child of divorced parents, forced to decide between his mother or father.
It is more complicated than the simple explanation that it would allow a majority of workplace employees to sign cards to join a union instead of holding secret ballot elections.
I went to Wikipedia for this definition:
Under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), if the National Labor Relations Board verifies that over 50% of the employees signed authorization cards, the secret ballot election is bypassed and a union is automatically formed. Introduced in the U.S. Congress in 2005 and reintroduced in 2007 and 2009, the EFCA provides that the NLRB would recognize the union’s role as the official bargaining representative if a majority of employees have authorized that representation via majority sign-up (card check), without requiring a secret ballot election. Under The EFCA, if over 30% and less than 50% of employees sign a petition or authorization cards, the NLRB would still order a secret ballot election for union representation. In other words, the current threshold to have a secret ballot election is signatures from 30% of employees. The EFCA would keep that threshold, but make a new threshold of signatures from 50% + 1 of employees to bypass the secret ballot election and automatically be unionized. Therefore a petition signature would have the same weight as a “yes” vote in a secret ballot election.
Speaking before the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which has about 1.6 million members, Biden said it’s time to “level the playing field” for unions by passing a bill that would make it easier for workers to organize.
Biden pointed out the difference between public sector employees, where 37 percent belong to unions, compared to the private sector, where just 7.5 percent of workers carry union cards. He said federal, state and municipal employees face fewer barriers to organization, while managers in the private sector use “every trick in the book” to undermine unions.
Biden said he and President Obama would not consider their economic recovery efforts a success unless growth creates “good, sustainable, livable jobs in the process.” A key element, he said, is rebuilding the American labor movement, which has steadily declined since the 1950s.
Moderate and conservative Senate Democrats are negotiating amendments to the bill to avoid a predicted filibuster by Republicans.
But the Democrats by no means are united on the issue. George McGovern, the most liberal Democrat ever nominated for president, opposes the card check bill. According to The Politico:
The liberal icon’s public break with the left has produced from his old allies anger, confusion and a failed campaign to persuade him to change his mind on the legislation, which would give workers the option of joining a union by signing cards rather than by voting in a secret ballot.
Instead, McGovern has stuck to his guns in an unlikely campaign that began in the pages of The Wall Street Journal , where he wrote that, for Democrats, abandoning the secret ballot would be “a betrayal of what we have always championed.”
Flirting with sacrilege, he compared his opposition to the bill to “my early and lonely opposition to the Vietnam War.”
McGovern’s stance may say more about the iconic, idiosyncratic former senator and Democratic presidential nominee than about the cause, but his words were repeated in television ads across the Midwest by business-backed groups, and labor leaders from Sioux Falls to Washington took note.
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, described the limitations of the system of NLRB elections quoted in Wikipedia:
“The current process for forming unions is badly broken and so skewed in favor of those who oppose unions, that workers must literally risk their jobs in order to form a union. Although it is illegal, one-quarter of employers facing an organizing drive have been found to fire at least one worker who supports a union. In fact, employees who are active union supporters have a one-in-five chance of being fired for legal union activities. Sadly, many employers resort to spying, threats, intimidation, harassment and other illegal activity in their campaigns to oppose unions. The penalty for illegal activity, including firing workers for engaging in protected activity, is so weak that it does little to deter law breakers.
Even when employers don’t break the law, the process itself stacks the deck against union supporters. The employer has all the power; they control the information workers can receive, can force workers to attend anti-union meetings during work hours, can require workers to meet with supervisors who deliver anti-union messages, and can even imply that the business will close if the union wins. Union supporters’ access to employees, on the other hand, is heavily restricted.
The Employee Free Choice Act [with its provisions for majority sign-up] would add some fairness to the system…”
The AFL-CIO states the following in arguing that the company-controlled secret ballots actually make the process less democratic:
“People call the current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election system a secret ballot election — but in fact it’s not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. It’s really a management-controlled election process because corporations have all the power. They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions. No employee has free choice after being browbeaten by a supervisor to oppose the union or being told they may lose their job and livelihood if workers vote for the union.”
Those who oppose majority sign up argue it strips workers of their right to a secret ballot and that it increases intimidation and pressure by union organizers, making it an inaccurate mechanism for determining employee support for unionization. Many business organizations, including The U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the implementation of card check. From its website:
“Under the existing law today, workers have a chance to vote for or against unionization in a private-ballot election that is federally supervised. Under Card Check, if more than 50% of workers at a facility sign a card, the government would have to certify the union, and a private ballot election would be prohibited–even if workers want one. By forcing workers to sign a card in public – instead of vote in private – card check opens the door to intimidation and coercion.”
According to a 2004 Zogby survey conducted for the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 78% of union members support keeping the current secret ballot system.
So there’s the arguments.
I can’t help but observe that both sides claim the secret ballots are subject to intimidation. Makes you wonder.
All I know is that the working stiffs deserve a larger piece of the pie. Without them there would be no dough (nor pun intended).
Cross posted on The Remmers Report
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18 Responses to “The Circuitous Game Of Card Check”
I didn't see the business side claim secret ballots are subject to intimidation – your Chamber of Commerce snippet claims that card check would be the option with intimidation.
From a pro-union blogger, here's the problem with the secret ballot process:
As they used to say on the internet, read the whole thing.
The “right of workers to democratic self-determination?” The guy is obviously under the illusion that companies are, or should be, democracies.
I have no idea why anybody would support this inane piece of legislation. Coercion is used by union organizers, or rather, pro-union propagantists, already to force workers to unionize. Card Check would just increase the use of coercion by pro-union propagandists. Let's try to keep the status quo.
Dr J–
Go back and read it again. The blogger (who's a woman, by the way) is mocking the attitude that says workers should have no rights.
There are plenty of people who think that unionization helped build the American middle class.
So they do, George, and they're not wrong. But the unions in Detroit ultimately killed their golden goose. If you're a fan of geese, you should look warily on unions.
Honestly, everything on that blog and in the article above just oozes “broken relationship.” Management and labor at any company both hope to reap economic success. The notion that they can do that by being at each other's throats, with a permanent mediator to keep the peace, is just plain daft.
The other issue in the card check law is the mandatory arbitration. Unions will secretly organize, take a hard line stance in negotiations, and then wait for the mandatory arbitratration to split the difference and give them most of what they want. In a time of doulble digit unemployment, why is the left supporting a bill that will eliminate employees and employers.
Why not allow are private employers to follow the same rules that the federal and state governments follow: open shop, limits on what unions can negotiate about and no mandatory dues.
SD And management wouldn't use the same tactic. Securitry used to be a high salary job at the Big Three, now it's done by $8.00 per hour rental cops from Brinks.
HORSESHIT!!!!
Unions did not decide which cars were going to be produced, what technology should be used, what the design should be or how the cars should be marketed. Management made all those decisions, unfortunately they were unable to think any further than the next quarter and made crappy decisions.
Democracy Now – David Simon, Creator of Acclaimed HBO Series “The Wire”: As Profit Motive Guts Newspapers, Communities Lose Out
Greed, short sighted greed is what has brought Detroit and most American Industries to the edge of collapse. There is no profit margin that is ever good enough for Wall Street, give them a 10% ROI and they want 15%, give them 15% and they will want 20%, give them 20% and they will want 30%.
HORSESHIT!!!!
Unions did not decide which cars were going to be produced, what technology should be used, what the design should be or how the cars should be marketed. Management made all those decisions, unfortunately they were unable to think any further than the next quarter and made crappy decisions.
Democracy Now – David Simon, Creator of Acclaimed HBO Series “The Wire”: As Profit Motive Guts Newspapers, Communities Lose Out
Greed, short sighted greed is what has brought Detroit and most American Industries to the edge of collapse. There is no profit margin that is ever good enough for Wall Street, give them a 10% ROI and they want 15%, give them 15% and they will want 20%, give them 20% and they will want 30%.
HORSESHIT!!!! – thanks for the warning, please put it at the start of all of your posts.
It was not greed that killed Detroit but the government's two fleets rule that killed them. Forcing the auto manufacturers to produce smaller cars that are less profitable rather than focusing on the larger more profitable cars brought down the US firms.
The two fleet rule did not affect the other manufacturers primarily because they were already able to turn a profit on the smaller cars (this can likely be attributed to the use of union labor by the US companies and lack of use by their foreign competitors). GM and Ford were most profitable making larger cars and trucks, the two fleet rule forced them to compete against the other companies in the small car market.
Funny how that two fleet rule did not prevent Toyota, Honda, VW, Mercedes, BMW, Hyundai from being profitable…
But at least we can agree that it is not Unions that killed them.
DQ, that's an empty accusation. Virtually everyone wants more money rather than less, including union workers. Pay them $40 per hour and they'll want $50. Pay them $50 and they'll want $60. When pay raises are on offer, they don't exactly resemble Spartans fighting off Persians.
Even the UAW has admitted some responsibility for Detroit's decline.
Offer Union Workers $200 an hour and no job two years from now or $40 an hour and a steady job for the next thirty years and most of them will take the $40 an hour where as if you offer an American Corporate Investor a couple hundred millions today with a worthless corporation a couple years from now or $10 million a year every year as far as the eye can see you can expect them to take the $200 million.
DQ, are you kidding me? Unions would take the $200 for two years in a heartbeat. They'd be idiots not to, and although they're as self-serving as the rest of us, they're not idiots. A lot can happen in two years. What's sure to happen is a huge cry of “look at all these union workers, the heart and soul of America, who are about to become jobless!!!” The odds of bailouts and renegotiations are high–just look at the events of the past six months.
Even if progressives could resist their urges and attempt to inflict–are you sitting down?–accountability on the workers by holding them to their bargain, with your numbers it's still a no-brainer. Workers would make as much in two years at $200/hour as they would in ten years at $40. If they really get the boot after two, they have eight years of vacation before plan B even catches up.
But I'm sorry, you were demonstrating that union workers are selfless philanthropists, and I interrupted it with a bunch of math. Please, continue.
I was going with sustainable, better a long term steady job with decent pay and benefits (Naturally some basic management/Union trust is required) than a large payout followed by years of unemployment and minimum wage jobs flipping burgers which is what is going to happen to most of the laid-off Union workers , on the other hand if the company is going down either way I taking every thing that isn't nailed down.
None of that “company already going down” nonsense, as if workers weren't part of the equation. Payroll is the largest expense many companies have, and paying $40 or $200 per hour has a lot to do with whether the company survives or not. Toyota and Honda kicked Chrysler and GM's butts because they could make cars not only better but cheaper, because their staff was more flexible and less expensive.
Detroit unions did demand salaries and labor rules that ultimately crippled their companies. It wasn't the only reason for Detroit's downfall, but it was a major one.
I don't mean to fault the unions for looking after their self interest, because everyone does (and should do) exactly that. I would fault them for short-sightedness, as I said killing their golden goose, but there's plenty of short-sightedness to be found everywhere too.