Correcting Fox News on Obama and Labor Rights
Tue May 20, 2008 at 03:01:28 AM PDT
Oh Lord, Fox News is standing up for the rights of employees....better get out the BS detector....
Secret Ballots May End in Union Elections If Obama Becomes President
Monday, May 19, 2008
By John R. Lott, Jr.
http://www.foxnews.com/...
Ok, the headline is actually one of the most truthful and revealing things Fox has ever published. Currently most secret ballots don't end in a union being elected; they end in a challenge from the employer, mandatory anti-union meetings, and illegal intimidation and firing of union supporters. Fox and the GOP fear that under Obama, secret ballots may result in a union actually being elected. With Bush, or McCain, new unions aren't a possibility.
After the headline, the article becomes misleading and resorts to scare tactics.
How would you like elections without secret ballots? To most people, the notion of getting rid of secret ballots is absurd. This is modern-day America. Such an idea could not be seriously considered, right?
All in favor of keeping secret ballots as the exclusive way to vote, raise your hands (snark). Caucuses are a strong way to elect a candidate by discussing pros/and cons and advocating for your choice. Petitions to make our government support our causes are not anonymous. Secrecy is unhealthy and bad for democracy. Secrecy lets people sell their vote, and not stand up for their beliefs. When secrecy is the law of the land, we will be a nation of cowards.
But more importantly, this first sentence has nothing to do with what Obama and a majority of Senators have not so secretly voted for with the Employee Free Choice Act. The EFCA does not do away with secret ballot elections. It leaves secret ballot elections as an option for employees, but strengthens the penalties for violating the current law, and requires employers to accept the results of a valid majority card check election. If employers suspect illegal coercion of employees, they can challenge a card check election.
Secret balloting has solved another potential problem: vote buying, which they essentially ended in U.S. elections. After all, why pay people if you couldn't be sure how they voted?
Hmmm. Interesting premise. Of course, secret balloting does make vote stealing possible. After all how could you steal an election if you knew how everyone voted? But fortunately Diebold doesn't administer secret ballot elections for unions, and again, Obama isn't suggesting doing away with the option for employees to choose a secret ballot process to form a union. More likely vote buying was essentially ended because it is illegal and prosecuted. I didn't even know that U.S. elections were at one time not secret.
Currently, when 50 percent of workers in a company sign statements to unionize, that merely sets up a second stage, where workers vote by secret ballot to determine if the company would be unionized. Under the new proposal, using a system called "Card Check," unionization would occur as soon as half the workers had signed cards stating that they favor union representation.
Two important words make this statement a lie:
"New." Card check is not new. U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of card check in 1969 stating, "Almost from the inception of the Act, then, it was recognized that a union did not have to be certified as the winner of a Board election to invoke a bargaining obligation; it could establish majority status by other means ... by showing convincing support, for instance, by a union-called strike or strike vote, or, as here, by possession of cards signed by a majority of the employees authorizing the union to represent them for collective bargaining purposes.'
"Would." This should be "could", since employees could choose a NLRB secret ballot election if they prefer anonymity and didn't mind waiting a few years to be able to negotiate for better wages and benefits. If they wanted to make that process shorter, they could use card check to negotiate a contract, which would have to be ratified by a majority of employees using "secret ballot." So the charges that a union could be elected by fraud is moot. You can't force employees to strike or accept a contract, or do anything that would give a union power over an employer unless the majority of employees are willing participants. Decertifying a union by card check is just as easy as forming one.
Fox goes on to change the issue from giving employees the right to choose the method of electing a union to attacking public schools, and blaming auto job losses on employees. Personally, I think we should have one school system, one highway system, and one water system. Yes, there should be opportunities for individuals to choose to pay for private schools, toll roads, or bottled water, but no reason for the government to pay for a second water pipeline all the way to Fiji for the benefit of a few. Also, the decline in auto jobs probably can be attributed to marketing and quality decisions as well as the disadvantage of our healthcare system which puts all the burden on employers.
Obama has promised in many ways to help unions and protect their workers from competition. He wants to renegotiate the NAFTA agreement signed under President Clinton. He opposes free trade agreements with such strong American allies as Colombia. He has long been opposed to educational vouchers, something teachers’ unions also strongly oppose. But despite all his troubles with working-class voters, it is hard to think of much else that Obama could promise unions.
Obama claims that strengthening unions is good because unions will "lift up the middle-class in this country once more." But protecting teachers unions from competition comes at the expense of students. Protecting workers from trade competition comes at the expense of customers and even other workers (e.g., if you protect steel workers from competition, the prices of American-made cars rise relative to foreign-made ones).
Unionization virtually always raises some workers' salaries at the expense of other workers. If unions insist on increasing worker pay by threatening strikes that shut down companies, firms reduce the number of workers they hire. Some workers gain higher wages, but only at the expense of causing other workers to lose their jobs. Possibly this last point explains why unions want to scrape secret ballots.
During the decline of unions in the US, executive salaries have gone from 80 times the average employee wage to 400 times the average employee wage. Some workers always earn more, and perhaps this explains why Fox and their corporate cronies whan to keep secret ballots from ever ending in a union election.
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