Look around the blogs and you'll see blogads with the corporate-financed slogan to "Save the Secret Ballot" attacking the Employee Free Choice Act. Now you can read all the horror stories about how employers have abused workers during union elections to understand why alternative "card check" systems are being promoted in this bill.
But even the principle behind the argument is a fraud. The obvious point is that companies don't allow secret ballots for electing managers. But the real fraud is that union workers have plenty of secret ballots under the Employee Free Choice Act:
- They elect union leaders by secret ballot;
- They vote on whether to authorize strike or other work actions by secret ballot;
- They approve union contracts by secret ballot
But without a union in the first place, most workers never see any ballot at all on their work conditions:
Let's be clear what happens when a majority of workers sign cards asking for a union. The company then has to meet with union representatives to discuss work conditions. That's pretty much it. After the union comes in, there are lots of discussions, debates and, yes, secret ballots by the members on all sorts of things even before a union contract can be negotiated and implemented.
"Getting a union" doesn't mean the workers all have to pay union dues without a secret ballot vote. In some "right to work for less" states, no one ever has to pay dues, and in the rest, it will take an agreement with the company and agreement by the membership to approve the contract. (In one provision of the new law, an impasse in bargaining could lead to a third party acting as an arbitrator for conditions in the first contract, but even there it's not the "union bosses" deciding terms).
And here's the irony. Corporations are run on "card check" agreements, also knows as shareholder proxies. Campaigns are run with groups of shareholders soliciting proxies and the side that collects a majority of those proxies ends up running the company (aside from all the anti-democratic rules that management uses to frustrate even that level of shareholder democracy). The same corporations mouthing off about the sanctity of the secret ballot never use it in running their corporations and they spend a chunk of their time working to undermine the power of shareholder democracy.
So since these corporations don't believe in democracy among shareholders and sure as hell don't believe in giving workers a secret ballot when a union isn't around, why should anyone take them seriously now?