Nov 23rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
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November 23rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm
How come progressives are playing catch-up on this one, when it is our initiative? The case against EFCA is much more out there in the general public than the case for it. This needs some real work.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:43 pm
It’s an imagery thing: “taking a way the secret ballot” is an easier sell that “our current NRLB system has multiple flaws, and allowing check card would make it easier to form a union.”
That’s why I’ve been pushing back with this argument: “checking a card is just as democratic as signing a petition or registering to vote – why are Republicans afraid of workers signing petitions?”
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:45 pm
IS there some reason to push for EFCA instead of repeal of Taft-Hartley?
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
It’s always easier to pass something new than to invalidate something old. It looks like you’re trying to do something good and new and progressive rather than “repealing regulations to help out a special interest.”
November 23rd, 2008 at 8:03 pm
I have no data on this, but I think there are legitimate objections to EFCA. I for one am a liberal gay marriage supporting Obama voter and I could never back this bill. Card check simply is not as democratic as a secret ballot. It is a fact that some employers treat their employees well and those employees make a rational choice not to vote for unionization (would you rather work for GM or Toyota right now, if you were an auto worker?). But a card check “election” never ends — the organizer can keep following you around hounding you and no matter how many times you say no, he’ll keep pressuring you to say yes and all this happens in full view of everyone. Ending the secret ballot is a sop to the unions that can’t win an election without this — far better in my view to fix the real problems with the NLRB, primarily the long delays to get a decision.
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
I’ve been looking for a defense of/case for EFCA.
That article didn’t provide it. The entire article dismisses the idea that some employees might coerce other employees to unionize. That seems dubious to me.
Instead of trying to stop corporate coercion, it appears EFCA is built to ADD employee-to-employee coercion.
It might be a good bill, but this article doesn’t make the case.
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:55 pm
King, have you ever witnessed a union election? I don’t think you have any idea what you are talking about.
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
People who talk about workers’ rightly only in relation to secret ballots are like people who talk about racial equality only in relation to undoing affirmative action. If your only sortie into the world of caring about justice and fairness is to wail about a policy designed to help the people who’ve always gotten the short end of the stick, and you don’t have any record or inclination to argue for anything else, you’re probably full of fertilizer, and just grasping onto some rhetoric.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Employers often coerce employees, fair enough- but what I don’t quite understand after reading the piece is how the secret ballot process is integral to that coercion. If employers sweat their workers in anti-union sessions or fire organizers, aren’t THOSE the activities we should crack down on? How does a card-check diminish the effects of coercion? Surely if one possesses the intestinal fortitude to sign a public petition, one can also tick a box in a closed ballot booth? If the malign influence of the employer can penetrate into the secret voting booth, won’t it be equally forceful in a public, visible forum?
It seems that secret ballots are either an important part of democratic decision-making or they aren’t. The fact that dissolution of the democratic process helps us in this instance is not a sufficient reason to embrace degrading the enterprise.
And “union organizers would not coerce anybody, of course” only seems true if you axiomatically accept that unions and their representatives are always benign. I suppose the same is true for incredulity in the face of the assertion that unions could ever be involved in organized crime.
Of course, if you believe these things you’re likely to see any refusal to unionize as a result of procedural injustice- any change that yields the desired outcome therefore becomes just.
November 24th, 2008 at 12:05 am
The more I look at the situation of the auto companies and the UAW, the more I think that we need to look at repealing 14B of the Taft-Hartley Act — a cause that was a big deal when I was a child in a USW town.
Why on earth do we have a situation in which we have different rules for union-management relationships in different parts of the country? The creation of whole regions of the country which are non-union resulted in parts of the country competing against each other for manufacturing jobs. The constitution forbade states setting up tariffs and duties on trade between the states, because the founders wanted to create a national economy. ‘Right to work’ legislation in some states divides the national economy and sets states in competition with each other.
Let us be clear about the historical forces present at the creation of this peculiar situation. National Labor legislation had to preserve the autonomy of the states to set their own labor relations because the sharecropping South could not be integrated into any modern industrial economy that assumed minimally free labor. Just as the ‘employers’ of ‘farmworkers’ were exempted from paying into the Social Security system.
Now that the Big 3 automakers are in trouble, the Republican party is anxious to make non-union automaking the norm in this country. It is sectional politics, and like most sectional politics in the USA, it is based in racism.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Ed Marshall:
I am a management side labor lawyer, so I have been involved in union elections for 13 years. I am the one allegedly arranging for the employees to be “coerced”, so you can say that I’m biased but not that I don’t know what I am talking about. For what it’s worth, I agree that unions have legitimate beefs with the Board process but EFCA does not address those problems, other than by introducing some additional ULP penalties. What is really needed is to dratically speed up processing of cases where the most serious wrongs are alleged, like firing an organizer. But, while I am sure I will find few believers here, the fact is that in my practice I have had maybe three serious allegations that a union lost an election for this reason, all of which involved organizers who got fired for misconduct that was on the border of what would get anyone fired. That’s out of a hundred plus elections. Remember, too, unions win half of elections held under the current system.
Joe –
I agree that that the “workers rights” mantle has been adopted by the business consortium lobbying against EFCA in a way that seems to contrast with what I assume many of their positions on things like tax fainess are. But of course, that doesn’t make them wrong. I agree with the Obama tax plan and probably any other liberal social value you can come up with (and to be fair that doesn’t mean I am right about EFCA either). The bottom line for me is that some employers will not treat their workers fairly without a union, and those are the ones already losing secret ballot elections. But some employees really don’t want a union and their employer has earned that trust and we don’t need to come up with a “fix” for that legitimate employee choice. And finally, as you draft your indictments of me as a paid corporate lackey, please address how you distinguish that from the very well paid union officials who are lobbying for EFCA with such passion (you’d almost believe that they were interested in more than workers rights.)
November 24th, 2008 at 9:05 am
But some employees really don’t want a union and their employer has earned that trust and we don’t need to come up with a “fix” for that legitimate employee choice.
No one is proposing such a “fix.”
If the workers don’t want a union, they won’t sign the cards. Do you think the national unions are going to put their resources and manpower into workplaces where the employees don’t want them there?
November 24th, 2008 at 9:39 am
If the workers don’t want a union, they won’t sign the cards.
There is substantial evidence that workers will eventually be worn down by pushy organizers and sign a card after having said no many times. I could just as easily say “if the workers want a union, then they’ll vote ‘yes’ in the secret ballot election” and of course many do. The question is how do we best learn about the workers’ choice made free of coercion. I think it’s in an election where you vote in secret and then it’s over — I think it’s hard to dispute that, but unions aren’t happy with the results, so yes, they are trying to “fix” that by going with an inferior system (in terms of employee free choice), but one that is far more advantageous to them.
Do you think the national unions are going to put their resources and manpower into workplaces where the employees don’t want them there?
This is a great question because until now, the answer has generally been no. Most smart unions have tried to get a good feel for how much support they have — and traditionally, it takes 60% to 70% of the employees having signed cards to ensure majority support by election day (usually about 40 days later) because the Company has its say/coerces everyone to vote no (depending on your view). But, this has been with an eye towards winning the election. I’m sure they’d love to have true majority support everywhere they go, but it remains to be seen whether, in an EFCA world, unions put the value of what a majority truly want ahead of their own interests. Unions are businesses and employees don’t pay them any dues until their shop is organized. The incentives will be there for them to use card check to unionize both the truly supportive and those where they can obtain 50% plus one cards through whatever methods are required.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Hi, I’m one of those pushy organizers. I work at a card-check neutral worksite (the University of California) signing up new members for our TA union. By the way, jus to de-mystify card check, it’s used frequently at the moment, the issue is that the employer doesn’t have to accept it. So if you get more than 50% signed up, they can still call an election, and if you win that, management can get 30% of employees to sign cards saying they want a de-certification election. The major change in EFCA is to make that 50% final – although the option to sign up 30% and call an election is still there.
I’ll tell you how my coercion goes: I walk up to someone, usually in their office or after or before they go to work, I introduce myself, shake their hand, go into my shpiel about the union while I hand them a card and a pen, and try to convince them to join. Sometimes people tell me to sod off, sometimes people get very passive-aggressive and say they need time to think about it and never get back to you, but most time people join without much need for persuasion.
I have no power over the person I’m talking to. I can’t fire them, I can’t discipline them, I can’t reassign them, I can’t force them to talk to me. The boss does have that power. In that circumstance, why would I try to use violence and intimidation against someone whose confidence, trust, and support I’m trying to win? Actual intimidation from union organizers is extremely, extremely rare because it’s a toxic strategy – even if you get that person to sign a card, you aren’t going to get them to walk a picket line or phonebank or go to a membership meeting or anything like that; when the word gets out and it inevitably will, you’ll have destroyed all possibility of building a rapport with workers and any idea that the union is an institution that’s on their side. Not to say that it doesn’t happen ever, or that it has never happened, but it’s a dead-end strategy that only the most depraved individual would employ and no sane institution would condone. You’d more or less have to assume that unions were kamikaze institutions to think that they would embrace this as a major tool, given the huge blowback they would face and the damage to their interests.
However, just to address the democracy angle for a second: card-check is no less democratic than signing a ballot petition or registering to vote – both parts of the political process that involve one-on-one meetings with committed activists asking you to somewhat publicly declare yourself, without the expectation of privacy you get in the voting booth. Keep in mind that in all union workplaces, after the first certification election, you don’t have subsequent elections as each new worker decides to join the union or not – an organizer comes up to them and asks them to sign as card, just like under card-check neutrality. So if signing a card vs. voting in an election is a violation of democracy, every existing union worksite is violating democracy.
As it stands, we have something of a democracy paradox – if a majority of people sign cards saying they want a union, the employer can demand an election; after that election, the Bush NLRB has decided, a minority of workers can sign cards saying they want to invalidate the election, and a new election has to be held. Union elections tend to be as democratic as the 99% referendums you see in banana republics – for reasons already detailed above. People have tried and failed repeatedly to reform the elections process, but you’d really have to go back and repeal Taft-Hartley and subsequent labor law, especially provisions that allow employers to spend unlimited amounts of company money on anti-union campaigns, require employees to attend vote-no meetings, require employees to attend one-on-one meetings, bar union organizers from the premises during elections, “predict” that the plant will close if the vote is yes, and so on and so forth.
One sign of how fundamentally flawed the process is: in public surveys, 44% of private-sector workers say they would like to join a union. Less than 9% of private-sector workers belong to a union.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:47 am
K. Larson:
Card check diminishes the effects of coercion by removing the electioneering from the worksite, where it’s under the eyes of management. You don’t have to tell management that it’s going on, so you short-circuit the coercion process otherwise known as the vote-no campaign.
And as for coercion by union organizers, as I relate above, it’s not about unions always being benign; there are some unions that have major problems. It’s more an issue of incentive: at base a union is an organization of workers to represent workers. For it to function, you need many members not only to join, but to be active – talking to other workers, reporting grievances, manning picket lines, working the phonebank, attending meetings, voting for officers, and so on. All of that requires a level of trust that the union is a positive institution that’s on the side of the workers. This trust is really hard to build, in a day and age when people are quite rationally afraid that union activity is going to get them fired. Violent coercion is poison to building up that trust. Word gets out inevitably, and then every worker’s face is turned against you. So unions don’t do it, if for no other better reason than enlightened self-interest.
King:
The coercive stuff we’re talking about is making people attend mass vote-no meetings where the union isn’t allowed to give its case, or individual one-on-one meetings where a worker can be grilled by management, or telling people that if they vote yes, the plant might be closed down or they’ll lose their pensions. And in terms of firing, it happens in 25% of union drives.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Like I said, King, funny how people suddenly develop such a passionate commitment to workers’ rights and uncoercive union election in THIS ONE SOLITARY AREA, without evern demonstrating the slightest concern, and actively seeking to tamp down concern, about myriad other problems related to those principles.
It’s like David Duke talking about the racism of affirmative action supporters – it’s best to just ignore him, because he’s operating in bad faith.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Steve:
You have done a good job of setting up labor’s latest EFCA talking point, that a secret ballot is not needed because signing cards is really just like “signing a ballot petition or registering to vote.” But the rest of comments make it clear that you simply don’t want to have to win a secret ballot election. You claim that this is because of coercion by employers, but you seem to equate influence with coercion. Yes, when we explain what strikes and dues and union constitutions and fines and superseniority are all about, some employees change their minds. But that’s called making an informed choice — you seem to want people to be influenced only by the union but not the company, which is your prerogative I suppose, but let’s not pretend like “there’s nothing to see here, just move along now” as we trash the NLRB voting booths. (As an aside, only NLRB geeks like us know what a feat of engineering those Board fold-out booths are.) I think the unions problems have more to do with the product they’re selling. You admit that less than half of people want to join a union, so why are you upset with only winning half of the elections held? And I understand that you think it’s bad for busines for unions to coerce people — I agree, but trust me, it’s bad pr for companies to coerce people too, which is why the vast majority don’t do it. If EFCA passed, I don’t think union violence or physical intimidation would be an issue very often, but those organizers whose tactics differed from your could take the repeated targeting of those who had said no (oe had yet to say yes) to a harassing level. And my question is — is that how we ought to be finding out what the majority wants, and I think the answer is clear.
Finally, as for the claim of 25% of employers firing organizers — that fiction has been debunked so often, I’m surprised someone as smart as you are is using it. A hugely pro-union academic, Kate Bronfenbrenner, sends surveys to lead union organizers who, surprise, claim that employers engage in unlawful discharges at a much higher rate than any actual study can document. NLRB statistics show the number is more like 2.7 %.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
King:
How informed is the choice when the union isn’t allowed to present its case at these meetings, when organizers can be banned from the premises, and when people can be fired for talking to them?
If you want to reverse 60 years of NLRB decisions and mandate equal time at company meetings, or allow a third party observer at one-on-one meetings, or prohibit threatening people’s jobs and pensions, I’m happy to run elections. I just know the difference between fair elections and rigged elections.
As for what I “admitted” 44% of the workforce would suggest a majority in many many workplaces, unless you assume that the same proportion exists in every factory. In any case, it does suggest that far more than 9% of workers want to have unions – yet the will of those workers isn’t being heard.
As for Kate Bronfebrenner, her conclusions are carried out in the work of Chirag Mehta and Nik Theodore, and John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer. NRLB statistics are obviously lower because not every person will complain about being fired, and given that corporations never say “we’re firing you because you’re a union organizer” and instead find a pretext, it’s notoriously hard to prove unlawful firings.
November 24th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Steve:
You say I am operating in bad faith — maybe you just meant corporate opponents of EFCA generally, I don’t know. Hard to fight that one (”yes, I am operating in good faith” doesn’t really do the trick). But if it’s me to whom you’re referring, as I said above, I consider myself a social liberal and an economic moderate. I have voted — using a secret ballot of course — for every Dem nominee since the Duke (Dukakis, that is, not David) and I work hard at legal aid aid and in other ways to fight income inequality and injustice. If you have a problem with me, it’s because we disagree, not because I’m hypocritically supporting corporate America — I proabably disagree with most of what the Chamber wants at any given time. I just don’t think Blivens or you have made the case that this is good for most people.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
If the issue is constant pressure to sign cards, why not simply put in a provision that places a time limit on the signature gathering process, and requires the union organizers to start over again if they don’t get the required number of signatures in the proscribed time?
It seems to me that people are looking for excuses to oppose the bill because they don’t like unions rather than trying to ensure that workers’ preferences are honored.
(And I say this as something of a union-skeptic, at least when it comes to work rules rather than wages and oppressive conditions.)
November 24th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Open question regarding coercion:
What if the union organizers / company reps aren’t coercing people, but overly enthusiastic regular employees (either for or against) are?
What then?
November 24th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Because in the case of a petition, that is not the end of it. A petition leads to a ballot initaitive or action that must be taken by a legislative body. Big difference.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
The whole argument for The Employee Free Choice Act assumes that Unions are good for America and are in fact part of the solution to the economic downturn. I propose that in fact Unions are the reason (at least partially) that we are in this mess and only offer more trouble with their policies.
The UAW has been the scourge of the U.S. auto industry. It is the Union Bosses (not the workers) that have pushed for gold-plated health benefits, 95% pay for laid off workers and other unrealistic benefits because they have needed to justify reaching into workers paychecks. Isn’t it safe to assume that if more industries are unionized that we will see more unrealistic benefits being extended to workers thus raising the costs of employing workers? Is that what we need to be doing as we reach unemployment levels that have not been seen since The Carter Administration that could go as high as 25% if this whole “2nd Great Depression” fantasy does come to fruition?
The massive pubic works and infrastructure spending that it looks like Obama will propose has the potential to put more Americans to work, but if it is done with union-only labor agreements and in the atmosphere created when the EFCA is passed, costs will skyrocket and all benefits to the economy will be lost.
The fact of the matter is that a weak economy with high unemployment is exactly the wrong time to encourage union membership.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
I consider myself pro-union, but King’s got it right: the article doesn’t say how secret-ballet initiatives encourage employer coercion. Paying employees to sit through anti-union presentations might not be pretty, but it’s within reason to allow employers to do that, just as employers can opt to not allow union organizing on company time. “Card check” just allows union organizers to focus pressure on the folks who would rather not unionize.
November 24th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Wait, how is it within reason to construct an election system where only one party gets to campaign? And Skeptict, it’s not just paying people – it’s ordering them, so that not attending = insubordination.
King:
I don’t think you’re arguing in bad faith, I just think that your interests are not the same as mine. Bottom line, if all other things are equal, I want unions and you don’t. I’m sure you’re a progressive guy in other ways, so are people like Warren Buffett or George Soros, but there is a certain conflict of interests between us.
Merit Man:
The point I was trying to make is that secrecy is not inherently democratic. The Athenian boule was a system of open voting, but it was still democratic. My argument is that I think politics that is public is still democratic.
Mister Nomer:
How can a person of equal status coerce another? Ultimately, besides outright beating someone up, there isn’t much you can do – you don’t have the power to fire, discipline, or transfer. Bugging people with a lot of phone calls and door knocking isn’t coercive – after all, when Obama people call you on the phone five times, we don’t consider that coercive. Why? Because there’s no way to punish.
The reason I see forced participation in company vote-no rallies as coercive is that the boss really does have power over their employees, the speech involved is not going to be at a level of equals, where people can stand up and dissent freely, where people hear both sides of the argument, where rational debate is held.
And actually, with card check, you don’t want to “focus pressure on the folks who would rather not unionize.” That’s criminally inefficient, like Obama people trying to organize hard-core McCain supporters. When I organize, I talk entirely to undecided or uncontacted people, and I try to get a yes or a no. Nos we don’t talk to again, we take them at their word and leave them alone. Yeses we involve in the union, but we don’t keep asking them to join. The only people I talk to more than once as an organizer are people who don’t say either way – and I’m happy to have them say no to me, because it’s a better use of my time to move on and talk to someone else. In fact, there have been times where people who have been “thinking about it” for six months and I just come out and say “feel free to tell me no, because I don’t want to waste any of your or my time.” I don’t take offense at being told no, because it produces a result and allows me to narrow the universe, and move on.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Again, ordering folks to sit through a presentation while they’re on the clock might be a drag, but they’re getting paid for their time – that’s the employer’s choice as far as i can tell. You’re asking that employers make allowances for the union to campaign on-site, but nothing is keeping them from campaigning outside of work. And i haven’t yet heard how a secret ballot encourages employer coercion – i’m genuinely sorry if i’m just missing it. Why shouldn’t the decision to unionize be a personal one? I’d support a check card system which maintained employee privacy (sending them to third-party regulators, for instance) – and if that’s how it would work, then sorry for my confusion.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I also voted for Barack Obama on the grounds of social issues; but economic policies such as EFCA are egregious and I was very disappointed to hear Mr. Obama supported this act.
Unions are terribly inefficient and cost the American consumers lots of money. Fact of the matter is, America is no longer a manufacturing giant and should focus on its comparative adavantages in the service industry. Dishing out $100,000 per head (this on top of outrageous compensation and benefits) to keep American steeworks at work is outrageous (see the book “New Ideas from Dead Economist” by Todd G. Bucholz for confirmation on this statistic).
Letting dying industries like American steel and automobiles is extremely expensive and we need to ask ourself: should we be paying $60,000 with full benefits to someone who is doing nothing more than screwing in bolts? Time to let the unions wither.
Addressing EFCA more specifically, the call for an open vote is a recipe for disaster – workers opposing unionizations will certainly be subject to strong arm tactics. Very dangerous, Jimmy Hoffa-type stuff. In a weak economy, such a pro-union measure is extremely dangerous and will only serve to furht drag down struggling American industries that are already drowning in excess comp and ben costs
With that said, I wish our president-elect Obama the best and hope he does not lean too far left in his sentiments towards big business, or else American business could be looking at a world of hurt.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
@ skeptic: why should they be public? it’s a vote… unions are not some benevolent organizations trying to help out disenfranchised workers…They make millions of dollars by taking a large cut of the employees’ paychecks to pay for their servies. they are quite expensive to employ actually, which is why many workforces choose not to be unionized.
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