In the comments yesterday on MissLaura's excellent post about the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), an important piece of legislation that would close off many of the shady tactics employers use to keep their employees from joining together in unions, several Kossacks asked for a guide to the arguments corporations are using to try and kill EFCA, and the truth behind each. So I thought I'd write up a quick guide to two big lies that business is using to try and stop EFCA, and the truth behind each.
More after the jump...
First, a brief explanation about what EFCA is all about (if you want more details, read the excellent dKos posts by MissLaura and Doughnutman). Union membership has been precipitously declining in the United States for many years. In 1956, 32% of working Americans were union members; today, by 2005, only 12.5% were.
This is a problem for all of us, because union jobs are good jobs:
- They pay better: 27% higher on average than non-union jobs
- They provide cheaper health care: union families pay 43% less for family coverage than non-union families
- They provide better benefits: 72% of union workers have a guaranteed, defined benefit pension, compared to only 15% of non-union workers
THE CURRENT SYSTEM: "ELECTIONS", OF A SORT
So, you may ask, if unions are so good for working people, why are fewer and fewer working people part of them? The reason is because corporations have twisted the organizing process so that workers who do want to join together have to negotiate a playing field that's steeply tilted in the employer's favor.
Which brings us to the first Big Lie about EFCA:
"The current organizing rules are democratic; workers organize by winning a majority vote in a free and fair election."
One of the things that we all know well from watching Iraq is that having elections does not equal having a democracy. You can have all the elections you want, but if they're unfairly administered or structured to favor one side, they're just a facade of democracy, not the real thing. And if you're a fan of unfair elections, you will love the union election process organized by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)!
In 2005, American Rights at Work issued a detailed report, Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Standards, that compares the NLRB election process -- the same one that the corporate spin calls "democratic" -- with the standards the U.S. applies to determine if an election in a foreign country is truly fair.
I won't bother recapping all the ways that NLRB elections fail these standards here; read ARAW's excellent report for that.
Instead, imagine an foreign country. In this country, citizens vote periodically via secret ballot for which party will lead them. However, in this country, one party has a few... advantages:
- It can require citizens to attend propaganda sessions demonizing all opponents, at pain of losing their jobs if they failed to attend;
- It can legally threaten citizens with shutting down the company that employs them if they vote for the opposition;
- It is, by law, the only party that can place literature in citizens' mailboxes, or on their doorstep -- all others are prohibited;
- It owns the property where the polls are located, and can tell individual citizens exactly when they should be at the polls to cast their vote, making it easy to associate "secret" ballots with the citizens who cast them;
- It retains the right, if it loses the election, to appeal the results through five separate levels of bureaucracy, with no requirement that the appeals be resolved in a timely fashion, and with the government being run by them during the appeals process.
In a union election, management is that party:
- Companies can (and do, in as many as 92% of elections) require employees to attend anti-union lectures, including ones given by supervisors with direct firing power
- Management can (and does, 71% of the time) claim that unionization will result in the company closing its doors -- an outcome that has only happened in 2% of cases
- Companies can advocate against the union in the workplace; organizers cannot set foot there
- Elections are typically held on the work site, and employers can mandate when and where each individual worker will vote
- The NLRB's protracted appeals process means that even winning an election might not result in unionization for many years -- in which time the company can wait for turnover to remove many of the original voters
(Want some case studies of how this plays out? Here's a 2000 report by Cornell University professor Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner examining how employers use economic leverage to push employees against unionizing, and ARAW has another good report from 2005 examining the full range of shady tactics employers have used in Chicago.)
Would we call such an election "fair" if it happened in Venezuela or China? If not, how is it "fair" in our own offices and factories? EFCA would replace this deeply flawed system with a better, fairer process, called "card check".
UNION COERCION ISN'T A PROBLEM. MANAGEMENT COERCION, ON THE OTHER HAND...
Card check works like this: rather than having a big "election day" run by the company, the voting is distributed out to the individual employees. The union makes its case to the employees and offers each of them a card. If they want the union, they sign; if they don't want the union, they don't. If a majority of the cards are turned in signed, the workers have a union. It's an elegant solution to many of the problems with the NLRB process. (Want more info? Here's an AFL-CIO FAQ on card check.)
The second Big Lie that opponents of EFCA usually roll out goes something like this:
"Card check is an open door for unions to force employees to vote for the union."
Here's how the Wall Street Journal phrased this particular Big Lie on December 28:
[I]t's more than a bit odd for union leaders, long proponents of what they are pleased to call "industrial democracy," to object to the secret ballot. As for Sen. Kennedy's [an EFCA sponsor] claim that he merely seeks a choice for workers between card-check and a traditional ballot, imagine you are Joe Lunch Bucket on your way to work. A beefy organizer greets you at the plant gate and asks you to sign a card in favor of representation by a union. Are you really going to say no?
Ah yes, the "beefy organizer" twisting the arm of poor Joe Lunch Bucket to get his way. Considering the decline in union membership, he must be quite the imposing fellow. But I digress.
Unlike the Journal, we can address this issue with actual statistics, rather than overwrought stereotypes. Card check is not some new thing; it's been used in union elections across the country. The invaluable American Rights at Work has another survey, Fact Over Fiction: Opposition to Card Check Doesn't Add Up, where they asked 430 randomly-selected workers whose work site had recently experienced a union election -- some through the NLRB election process, and others through card check -- what they experienced in the election process.
Here's what they found:
- Of all workers surveyed, 22% reported being pressured by management "a great deal" to vote their way, while only 6% reported being pressured "a great deal" by the union
- 46% of workers who had experienced NLRB elections reported management pressure; only 14% of workers who had experienced card check reported pressure from the union
- Only 4.6% of workers who'd experienced a card check election reported that the presence of the union organizer made them feel pressured to sign the card
In short: in real-world union elections, pressure from union organizers is not the problem; pressure from management is the problem. EFCA would go a long way towards restoring fairness to the process and giving each employee an opportunity to vote his or her conscience. That's why labor is for it, and why you should be too.