Terry Mitchell

Why Such Union Contempt for the Secret Ballot?



Posted: Thursday, December 18, 2008

by
http://commenterry.blogs.com

The proposed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which has been passed in the House of Representatives but has stalled in the Senate, would remove the requirement for a secret ballot election before employees could unionize. Currently, a card check (open) vote is used as a preliminary vehicle for employees to state their desire to be represented by a union.
 
If at least 30% of them want a union, then a second vote – supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – is conducted by secret ballot. Then, if more than 50% of the employees vote in the affirmative, they can officially petition for representation by a union recognized by the NLRB.
If it becomes law, the EFCA would circumvent this process and allow an official call for a union if more than 50% of the employees vote ‘yes' during the card check vote. However, the lack of a secret ballot would greatly increase the chance that some workers could be intimidated by the union, the employer, or other employees. Therefore, they might not necessarily vote their true feelings.

Almost every other kind of voting that takes place in this country is done by secret ballot. That's because it's the only real way to ensure that people won't be making their selections under duress or coercion. Why then do unions – the driving force behind this proposed legislation – seem to have so much contempt for the secret ballot process? If their goal is to eliminate the requirement for workers to vote twice, then why not keep the secret ballot vote and do away with the card check vote?

Obviously, the answer is that they want to have as much influence on the employees' decisions as possible. This is in keeping with their common practice of fostering a group mentality. Unions and their members have been known to harass, belittle, and isolate non-union workers who exercise their right (in right-to-work states) to refuse to join the majority of their co-workers in being represented.

Worse yet, many unions are not averse to the use of intimidation. In fact, it is something that they will very often pull from their tool belt of strong-arm tactics. Look no further than the way "scabs" – those who dare cross picket lines – are frequently treated. Many of them are threatened, verbally abused, and physically blocked from doing their jobs. And they are only doing the jobs that union workers should be doing, but instead are out on strike. Yeah, that's the ticket – I'm refusing to do my job and I'm also going to prevent others from doing it.

And some strikers, with union approval, are not above inconveniencing or even causing injury to innocent bystanders who have nothing to do with their dispute, as long as they can incur some damage to those evil management types and their scabby co-conspirators. Oh well, what's the problem with a little collateral damage in the fight for workers' rights, huh?

Of course, unions and their organizers will say that the EFCA is needed to prevent companies from intimidating their employees into voting against unionization, or even blocking them from doing so. But this doesn't make sense. With a secret ballot, no one, including an employee's direct supervisor, would know how he or she voted on the union question. Any scare tactics used by management in that regard against any one person or group would likely have little effect. The company would have to threaten to clean house if their employees chose unionization, and such a threat would be difficult to keep secret, much less get away with.

I can understand the sentiment for wanting to streamline the process of allowing workers to request union representation. However, let's achieve this goal by switching to a single vote – via secret ballot.
 
Terry Mitchell is a software engineer, freelance writer, amateur political analyst, and blogger from Virginia, USA. He posts a least one article a day to his blog - http://commenterry.blogs.com - on subjects such as current events, politics, technology, society and culture, religion, health and well-being, self improvement, personal finance, trivia, and sports. Terry is also the owner and operator of a website that is dedicated to allowing U.S. citizens to find all types of insurance at reasonable prices.  
 
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by jennifer cuddy
 3 years 36 days ago.
Hmm..this is interesting. I can't answer that. Unions are good and unions are bad. For example, the State of Maine use to depend upon the paper mill industry for the majority of their wealth and employment opportunities. But when the paper mills beca,e unionized, the companies left the state to go down south to avoid having to deal with unions.
 
But this is just like companies who hire overseas where there is cheap labor. Personally, I think that these companies should have sanctions imposed on them; enough to make it more lucrative to hire Americans in America.
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