The Opinion Journal reports on the latest move by organized labor to increase their membership. They want the time-honored rules allowing for a fair election to decide whether workers want a union overturned. Instead they want to be able to use intimidation and peer pressure to force workers to sign cards publicly to support the union organizing efforts. All the fancy justifications aside here, this scheme is a fundamental attack on democracy.
Thus 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.
Now that Congress is back under Democratic control, unions sniff a win. Card-check bills sponsored by Democratic Rep. George Miller and Sen. Ted Kennedy last year had 215 co-sponsors in the House, just shy of a majority, and 42 co-sponsors in the Senate. Union political operatives made it clear during the recent election campaign that any Democrat who opposed card check could forget about campaign backing in the future.
Republicans still have the strength to filibuster such a measure to death, and President Bush might veto it. But a weakened GOP and president might be tempted to let it through, particularly if it's attached to something they want. If so, it is likely to be seen as a fundamental reversal of the anti-union trend unleashed by Ronald Reagan's crushing of the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1981.
The card-check tactic already is being used with some success. More than half the workers who joined unions last year did so in card-check sign-ups to which companies had "voluntarily" agreed, according to the AFL-CIO. Congressional action would make the card-check procedure routine.
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."
The secret ballot allows workers to make a real choice. Card checks allow organizers to use outright intimidation against those who prefer not to work in a union shop. I really have no objection to a union winning one of these elections fairly. I do have a problem with this assault on democracy, however. The secret ballot is fundamental to maintaining the fairness of these elections, pure and simple.
UPDATE: Paul Silver, posting at The Moderate Voice, is on the same page.
I hope this won’t be another Republican cave by the spineless b——ds. This would give the Dems a huge advantage and only a suicidal Republican party woud go along with it.