House passes Employee Free Choice Act

The House passed the Employee Free Choice Act yesterday. If the bill becomes law, it will be a major victory for organized labor.

The EFCA would force employers to recognize unions formed by so-called "card checks." Currently, employers are only required to recognize a unions approved by a secret ballot in a NLRB election. Under the EFCA, employers would have to recognize a union if a majority of workers in a shop signed union cards.

The silly Republican spin is that the EFCA deprives workers of their right to democracy.  This isn't about the employee's right to vote, it's about the employer's "right" to put their employees through the bureaucratic bullshit of an NLRB election.

If you've ever been involved in a union vote, you know how miserable the process is for all concerned. We had one at my grad school. The secret ballot didn't stop either side from badgering the students. The fact that the rank and file voted in secret just made the organizers more conspicuous by comparison and easier to single out later.

Of course, as soon as the vote took place, lawyers promptly challenged the election on technicalities. Months later, we still didn't know the outcome of the vote because our "free democratic expression" was sealed pending a legal battle.

Despite what the Republicans say, a card-check is an up or down vote. A card check is democratic because the majority rules. Democracy is about honoring the will of the people. A card check only succeeds if the majority wants to organize. A card check finds out what workers want by asking them. Then, they actually get what they want without having to waste months fighting about it.

The nominal rationale for a secret ballot is to prevent unions and management from bullying workers. However, secret ballots are ineffective way to accomplish the stated goal. Besides, there are other laws to protect workers from intimidation and coercion. If we need even tougher laws to safeguard the rights of workers during organizing drives, let's pass them. At least these laws can be written to affect labor and management equally. Instead of protecting workers, the secret ballot system massively favors management because bosses have the resources to win by attrition.

Comments

[greensmile]

Forgive me for linking my own little research here but I see a pattern in the distribution of states with highest levels of health insurance coverage: they were the states where organized labor once had a strong political voice.

So, by me, this legislation is a sign of good things to come, though it may take a decade to get here.

[The Phantom]

The only reason for seeking removal of the secret ballot is to intensify and target voter intimidation. There is no possible other purpose.

This bill is pro-union and anti-worker. Fortunately it will be vetoed the minute it manages to reach the President's desk.

Unions represent a small minority of American workers. And that's not because anyone has succeeded in intimidating American workers. Its because the unions have not succeeded in intimidating workers into joining them.

[Alon Levy]

Well, there are certain advantages to unionization. In Sweden and Norway, where a large majority of workers are unionized, wages are set at high levels by collective bargaining, so that on the one hand there's no minimum wage but still every worker receives a living wage.

[B-Money]

I am not a fan of unions. My experiences with teachers' unions, police unions and other trade unions makes me jaded. It is too hard to fire these people when they do shit work, don't teach effectively or are bad cops. Also, I feel that the trade unions, in particular the UAW, is responsible for a tremendous amount of jobs because their demands were outrageous.

That being said, since we are becoming a service based economy, I think unions for the service workers are essential. I was a union member when I worked for a grocery store many years ago and always was piad above the minimum wage and received good benefits. Workers at the "big box" stores need unions to make sure they earn a proper wage and to keep the companies honest. Wal-Mart is a joke on this and actively tries to avoid paying one cent more than they have to to its workers.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Secret ballots are supposed to protect workers from intimidation, but I see no evidence that they accomplish that goal.

Unions are founded by card-check all the time. It's not new. That's how the Houston janitors got their union. If their employers had been wise, they would have honored the will of their employees to begin with.

There are plenty of other ways to protect workers from intimidation on both sides. Like, enforcing existing labor laws, and the existing laws period. If you want to talk about intimidation, look at who has the power to fire whom. It's management intimidation workers really have to worry about.

Management has way more power to intimidate workers than union organizers who are trying to organize a non-union shop. It's not hard to find out who supports the union and who doesn't. Workers talk to each other, management recruits stool pigeons. A secret ballot doesn't do anything.

The NLRB election system is wasteful, bureaucratic, divisive, and unfair. It's just a hoop that the government makes workers jump through in order to bargain collectively.

[The Phantom]

There have been advantages to unionization in many places. But I see American unions as far more corrupt than those in Scandinavia.

The US autoworker unions have been unbelievably helpful in destroying those once powerful industries. The management played its part by focusing on SUVs and trucks, but the unions broke the back of GM and Ford and Chrysler, not just with health care costs, but with forcing the company to essentially keep employees on the payroll forever even when times were bad.

Soon, noone in the UAW will have a job.

Meanwhile, the nonunion US employees of Toyota and other foreign firms are treated well and are in a vastly better position than the union workers.

If America is to have a union future, it had better be a different type of union.

[The Phantom]

--A secret ballot doesn't do anything. --
Bullshit

You can tell the union thug that you're going to vote for the union, and then check the ballot NO.

Without a secret ballot, the intimidation of those who oppose the union will be neverending. There will be 100% accurate information of who opposed the union.

---
B-Money is correct in that unions can tend to protect the lowest possible denominator. I for one would oppose being part of an organization that protects deadwood.

Speak to someone who deals with union employees in New York agencies and you will know what I am talking about. You can never get rid of deadwood, you "pave" over them by hiring hard workers and paving over the trash that will not leave and who cannot be fired. That is what public sector unions do--I do not want that it in the private sector.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Do you have any evidence that there's more intimidation in card check drives than in NLRB elections? They're already happening. They'll continue to happen with or without the EFCA. Organizing drives have been around a lot longer than the NLRB.

The EFCA won't have an effect on intimidation one way or the other. If a union wants to offer people union cards, nobody can stop them. So, workers will be on the record one way or the other. The only difference with the EFCA is that management will actually have to recognize votes that are happening anyway.

[Alon Levy]

If America is to have a union future, it had better be a different type of union.

That different type of union already exists; it's called SEIU.

[B-Money]

That's the name of it! Thank you Alon. I couldn;t remember the name of the Service workers union. I have no problem with them. In fact, I think they need to grow and gain power to comabt the Wal-Marts and the like.

[aeroman]

It's interesting how conservatives who put so much stock in the death-by-red-tape concept seem so willfully blind to it here.

[The Phantom]

Its interesting how "liberals" who put so much stock in democracy oppose one if its essential tenets --secret ballot--here.

Secret ballots in elections of this type were established with the strong consent of organized labor, at a time when American workers supported unions. Now, at a time when American workers do not respect unions nor do they want to be "represented" by them, organized labor wants to be able to bludgeon and intimidate their way back to power.

It won't work.

Long ago, as now, it is the opponents of secret ballots who are the enemies of working people.

I do no want any union boss representing me. Period.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

The EFCA won't have any impact on the potential for intimidation.

Card checks already happen. Unions are certified this way all the time. The EFCA won't change that.

Besides, even under the current certification system, there's always a non-secret vote to initiate the unionization process with the NLRB. Since "non-union" is the status quo, voting not to open NLRB negotiations is equivalent to voting "no" in the election.

The law already acknowledges that the will of the employees is what's really binding. If 30% of the workers in the prospective bargaining unit vote "yes" to open NLRB-mediated negotiations, the NLRB steps in to attempt to broker a deal. At this point union can be certified without an election if the employer agrees. The only reason to have an election is if the employer objects to the union. The goal of these elections is not to protect the minority rights of workers who don't want a union, since you don't even need a majority (or even a vote) for the NLRB to certify the union. They only exist as a kind of binding legal "check" that the union has the amount of support it claims. It's the support that opens the door for a union, not the vote. It's as if polling data elected the president but the loser could dispute the outcome by calling an election.

Given how the current system works, it's absurd to argue that the EFCA will make the process any less democratic.

[Windypundit]

I don't know much about unions, but reading these comment makes me think I should learn. A couple of things stood out:

"Card checks already happen. Unions are certified this way all the time."

"The goal of these elections is not to protect the minority rights of workers who don't want a union, since you don't even need a majority (or even a vote) for the NLRB to certify the union."

So the NLRB plus 30% of the workers---voting in a non-secret ballot---can start a union even if the other 70% of the workers don't want one?

I see. I guess your argument is that secret ballots don't matter because the choice to unionize is only fake fake democracy anyway?

[Windypundit]

I mean, am I misunderstanding something? Because what I think you're saying makes no sense. What am I missing?

[Windypundit]

"...there are other laws to protect workers from intimidation and coercion. If we need even tougher laws to safeguard the rights of workers during organizing drives, let's pass them."

Okay, but...

"The NLRB election system is wasteful, bureaucratic, divisive, and unfair."

Well then, instead of eliminating the elections, why not pass laws to fix those problems?

"It's just a hoop that the government makes workers jump through in order to bargain collectively."

Taking a vote isn't a hoop to jump through, it's the process that legitimizes it. I'll take your word for it that it's tied up in bizarre rules, but that's no reason to eliminate a secret ballot. There are tens of thousands of secret ballot elections in this country. With a few notable exceptions, they're not that hard to do. This should be an easy fix.

[Mnemosyne]

Though I realize our resident trolls are unlikely to be persuaded by pesky things like facts, it turns out that workers prefer card checks since they're far less likely to be harassed by management than they are in an election:

http://tinyurl.com/2o6vub

The important nugget, via Ezra Klein:

"During the NLRB election, 46% of workers complained of management pressure. During card check elections, 14% complained of union pressure. Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely as workers in card check elections to report that management coerced them to oppose."

But I guess if you're opposed to unions, you're going to argue in favor of the method that currently involves the most amount of coercion by management and not the method that the workers themselves say is better for them.

[Windypundit]

Mnemosyne, I followed those links and while it appears that the NLRB election process is screwed up pretty bad, I'm still not convinced card checks are the answer.

For one thing, it sounds like most of the advantage of the card check comes from the neutrality agreement. I don't know how NLRB elections work, but could a similar agreement be used?

For another, the study keeps talking about workers being "coerced" by their employer, but coercion isn't possible with a true secret ballot---because the employer has only the employee's word for how he voted---so either NLRB elections aren't really secret (which is certainly possible for all I know) or the study is stretching the meaning of the word coercion to include any kind of pressure.

For example, one of the complaints is that companies threaten to close down. Since a big part of the union's bargaining power is going to be the threat to close the worksite via a strike, I have trouble seeing how this is unfair, unless you define all opposition to the union as unfair.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

It's just invalid to argue against the EFCA on the grounds that it will make things less democratic than the status quo.

The question under discussion is whether the EFCA is preferable to the status quo.

If you want to propose an entirely new NLRA instead of amending the old one, that's fine. However, that's not the topic at hand.

[The Phantom]

The bill is dishonest in every respect, even in its name.

If an employee chooses to keep his/her choice secret, as many have, that choice has been taken away.

Its a step backward, and it will not become law. Not now, anyway.

[C1BYRD]

The number of anti-union posts on this thread amaze me.
Many of these anti-union comments are risible, strawman arguments. The same anti-union comments came from the left during the transit strike in NYC. The attitude is, where unions can help me and those like me they should be encouraged. The rest of the unions, the mechanics, the pilots, the transit workers, the autoworkers are bad because the people in them are bad. Bullshit.