The federal ‘Free Choice Act’ is anything but
THE NEWS TRIBUNE
T he secret ballot is fundamental to democracy. It’s as important in unionization votes as it is in political elections.
That’s why Congress ought to reject the Orwellian-named “Employee Free Choice Act,” a bill that would deliver exactly the opposite of what it promises.
The EFCA is designed to strengthen organized labor’s hand in dealing with employers. As a broad goal, that’s a matter of legitimate policy debate.
But one of its provisions is outrageous. It would let organizers pre-empt the usual union-certification elections and win the right to represent a group of employees by collecting signatures from a bare majority of them.
The catch is, the signatures on the required cards would not be confidential. The organizers would know who signed and who didn’t; they could disclose that to anyone. This would multiply the opportunities for coercion. Workers who might prefer a different union – or no union at all – would know that their refusal to sign could become common knowledge in their workplace.
Peer pressure from union supporters can be intimidating. So, for that matter, could pressure from union organizers themselves. Secret ballots are the only way to guarantee workers a genuinely free choice.
Defenders of the EFCA scheme point out that the bill wouldn’t repeal existing provisions for secret elections – it would merely give union leaders the discretion to hold them.
That’s a disingenuous argument. In actual practice, a union would be insane to leave things to an uncontrollable election when it could proceed directly to certification by pressing workers to sign cards.
At smaller companies, union organizers could collect enough signatures in a matter of hours, before their effort became public knowledge. That’s another reason the EFCA’s supporters want to bypass elections; the sheer speed of certification-by-signature could effectively prevent employers from presenting arguments against unionization.
Last August, former Sen. George McGovern – a liberal Democrat by any reckoning – appealed to the bill’s Democratic sponsors to drop the legislation.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, McGovern wrote: “Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal. ...
“We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.”
Democrats, of all people, should be willing to let workers keep their personal decisions on their working conditions to themselves.
