Patrick McIlheran: Unions
have a problem with free choice
By
Patrick McIlheran
Posted: 03/15/2009
12:01:00 AM CDT
President Barack Obama, once
foursquare for repealing workers' right to a secret vote on
unionizing, now seems to be looking for a way out of his promise.
But most congressional Democrats look like they'll insist, since
unions are insisting.
As long as we're having a new New
Deal, unions see this "card check" law as the 1930s
recrudesced, a moment to bounce back from the depths of enrolling
only 7.6 percent of the private work force. On the Employee Free
Choice Act, unions are not asking; they're telling.
This should surprise no one.
Compulsion pervades unions' comeback effort. "Free Choice
Act"? Free choices underlay unions' trouble, and they know
it.
But "choice"
sounds good, so unions say the new law would let employees choose
whether to vote on unionizing. It does no such thing. The law
declares that once a union collects signed cards from half the
employees it wants to organize, regulators "shall not declare
an election" but must say the union wins.
Unions needn't even tell all the
employees. In 2007, nurses in suburban Los Angeles who opposed
unionization complained that they never were told the drive was
taking place, since organizers circulated cards only to known
backers. The union got the employer to keep mum, too.
Silencing the employer is a key
aim. Unions say that secret votes aren't really free because
employees are given too much information by employers. The boss
can order employees to come to anti-union meetings, for instance.
Solely by settling the matter with
cards before the employer catches on could things be fair, they
say.
Only, as labor lawyers point out,
bosses may order employees to an anti-union meeting, but they
can't fire them for not showing up. That's illegal. They can tell
employees that unionizing might make the plant less competitive,
but they can't say they'll close it. The National Labor Relations
Board can and does declare the union triumphant, without a vote,
for such company misdeeds.
As to whether collecting publicly
signed cards amounts to a free choice, it's telling that there's a
series of cases revolving around card tricks. One dodge found in
NLRB complaints is the raffle: Unions invite prospects to a
meeting, where there's a drawing for a door prize. But read
carefully the small print on the entry you must sign. One
Minnesota case involved union organizers going to employees' homes
at night in pairs, saying the company needed a benefits form
signed. Well, no. On Tuesday, Congress heard from an Indiana man
who repeatedly rebuffed organizers — until one told him that the
card drive won and he had to sign simply to get his
"information in the system." Untrue, but it worked.
These are the reasons courts
repeatedly have said that only secret elections are reliable.
Oddly, unions concede this. They now may seek an election once
they have cards from 30 percent of employees. They never do. The
Teamsters tell organizers to shoot for 65 percent; the Service
Employees International Union says "it's unwise" to go
to a vote without 70 percent. They know lots of signatures were
given just to make organizers buzz off.
Fundamentally, these unions do
not think they'll fare as well under uncoerced conditions.
That's a pity in that
unions presumably do offer some real benefit to those who belong,
as I, grudgingly, do. If so, you'd think they could make their
case without betraying democracy.
But the fact is that even if
their law is triumphant and unions again have the whip hand, it
won't usher us back to the golden 1950s, when the benefits were
rich and the jobs permanent. As Brink Lindsey pointed out in an
insightful new paper for the Cato Institute, what's changed since
that era of "nostalgianomics" hasn't been labor law but,
instead, an end to the old New Deal's pervasive cartelization of
the American economy.
Where once prices were regulated,
lending limited, trade tariffed and top-earning entrepreneurs
taxed at 91 percent, this leashing of competition faded in the
1970s and 1980s. Liberalization gave customers choices. It also
meant that buyers once captive to businesses extracting high
prices to fund union bounty were free to go elsewhere.
Choice, that is, won. It will go
on winning unless the country's prepared to coerce itself on
matters far broader than just union elections.
Patrick McIlheran is an editorial
columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His e-mail address
is pmcilheran@journalsentinel.com
:-)
:-) 
