Card Check Under Their Skin

    It's been a fairly accepted idea that many unions are abandoning the process of organizing workers via the National Labor Relations Board election procedures. According to Steve Greenhouse's piece today, card check is overwhelmingly becoming the accepted route to unionization:

Card checks were used to sign up roughly 70 percent of the private-sector workers who joined unions last year, according to A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials. That compares with less than 5 percent two decades ago.

    Employers are freaking out about card check because it does remove much of the ability of companies to intimidate workers. So, they are trying to get card-check declared illegal via a bill by Rep. Charlie Norwood (a real dim bulb in the House).

"Union thugs are allowed to confront individual workers on the job and at their homes, and demand the worker sign a card giving the union exclusive rights to representation," Mr. Norwood wrote in an op-ed article in The Washington Times.

    Can't they come up with more updated language than "union thugs?"

    One thing I wish the AFL-CIO, and reporters like Greenhouse, would stop doing is misleading people about the Employee Free Choice Act. Greenhouse writes:

Labor unions are backing a bill that would give unions the right to use card checks while taking away the right of companies to insist on secret-ballot elections. The bill has 210 co-sponsors in the House and 42 in the Senate.

But even supporters say it will probably not pass in this Congress because President Bush is likely to veto it.

    That bill has no chance of passing anytime in the next decade or two, unless you believe it can attain 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster. Much of the rhetoric about the 2006 elections and beyond promises that if the Democrats take over the Congress, the bill will pass.

    This is just misleading. Even if you want to believe that the Democrats could win 60 seats in the Senate (and that would require you to also believe Barry Bonds never touched steroids), the Democratic Party is not a bastion of union support. Remember, back in the 1990s, when the bill to ban permanent replacement workers in strikes (that would be scabs) was just two votes short of the 60, it was the 2 Democratic senators from Arkansas--Dale Bumpers and David Pryor--who would not add their names to the vote...yes, Bill Clinton did not deliver his own two home-state senators...and the bill stalled. If you think that the Democratic Party is any more favorable to pro-labor legislation with all the mumbo-jumbo about so-called free trade, competitiveness and the free-market being spewed by Democratic Senators, then you are not paying attention.

    But, I think unions have to come up with a better rap about card check because, frankly, the idea of secret-ballot elections is very seductive. One idea would be to run ads that counter the Chamber of Commerce's attack on card check--show scenes of people voting in military dictatorships under the watchful gaze of armed soldiers (come to think of it, that's the so-called democracy in Iraq) and, then, juxtapose that voting environment with that of a worker trying to vote for a union with the employer spying on her.