Fundamentally Anti-Democratic
The push by unions to eliminate the requirements for a secret ballot in unionization votes is reaching high gear in the House of Representatives. This change would force companies to recognize unions based only on the so-called card check recognition. This is completely and utterly anti-democratic.
The House of Representatives has scheduled a vote as early as today on a bill that strips 140 million U.S. workers of the right to decide in private whether to unionize. Naturally, it's called the Employee Free Choice Act.
Big Labor has been agitating to ease union-formation requirements for more than a decade. And prior to last year's election, the AFL-CIO, AFSCME and their allies made it clear to Democrats that this vote would be the most important return they expected on their investment in a Nancy Pelosi Speakership. This is payback day.
The union claim is that employers are engaging in rampant unfair labor practices to prevent employees from exercising their right to organize. But data from the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, show no rise in such activities. The reality is that union membership has been in decline for decades, and labor leaders are desperate to rig the rules in order to reverse the trend. In the 1950s, 35% of private-sector workers were unionized. By the early 1980s the number had fallen to 20%, and today it stands at just 7.4%.
The reason for this decline isn't illegal management meddling in organizing efforts. The problem is that unions haven't been able to persuade the workers themselves. Our own, longstanding position is that when a company is organized it is almost always the company's fault. But workers of all classes and skills can also read the news and understand that unions no longer provide job security, if they ever did. The most heavily unionized industries–such as airlines and Detroit carmakers–are typically those that are financially beleaguered and shedding jobs. Workers know that unions often provide short-term wage gains at the cost of longer-term job insecurity.
I don't really care if workers want to organize into a union, provided they vote for it. But this card check scheme would make peer pressure and outright intimidation rampant and would take away the rights of workers to a real vote in the matter. The Democrats should really be ashamed of this.
By Rightmom, March 1, 2007 @ 8:54 am
I believe the mistake in your article is the fact that you used Democrats and ashamed in the same sentence. Democrats are so morally bankrupt they wouldn’t recognize shame if it came up and slapped them in the face.
By crosspatch, March 1, 2007 @ 11:32 am
It was pretty funny recently when a union tried to force a local independent grocery to unionize. The union picketed the place but then the employees themselves started handing out leaflets to customers saying that they didn’t want the union. The employees encouraged the local shoppers to come out to the store on the day the union was to hold some kind of rally in the parking lot. I don’t think they are trying to organize that store anymore.
It was a Farmer Joe’s market in Oakland. I think they even got Ed Asner in on the act to try to intimidate the place into unionizing.
The unions were good in getting some important changes made, but the vast majority of those changes are now codified in labor law. The unions these days are nothing more than extortion rackets and ways to promote cronyism and nepotism.