The army of anti-worker corporate groups hiring armies of lobbyists and pouring $200 million into defeating the Employee Free Choice Act have devoted most of their time and money to hammering home a single talking point: The bill will eliminate the sacrosanct "secret ballot" now enjoyed by workers deciding whether to join unions.
There are two answers to the $200 million avalanche of mdisinformation and dire implication the Chamber of Commerce, WalMart, and their ilk are throwing out:
First, it is important to understand that the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate any method by which workers can elect to join a union. The two current forms -- majority sign-up and scheduled NLRB election -- will continue to exist. The Employee Free Choice Act simply gives workers, rather than employers, the choice which to use. As David Waldman wrote yesterday:
If I want into a union and feel like saying so, get the hell out of my way, boss. Nobody asked you. It shouldn't be up to you how I get to express that any more than you get to decide how I invite people out for beers after work.
"Hey, you can't just invite Joe out for beers. You've got to have a federally supervised secret ballot election on whether or not you can ask him."
But that answer isn't good enough for some liberals concerned by the corporate campaign against Employee Free Choice. If it's not enough for you that under this law, workers get to choose how they want to vote for a union, there are some things you should know about what the "secret ballot" in the workplace entails.
As labor scholar Gordon Lafer writes:
When employees want to form a union, they have to go through a process that looks more like the discredited practices of rogue regimes abroad than like anything we would call American.
For an election to be "free and fair," both sides must have equal access to media and the voters. But not under labor law. Anti-union managers are free to campaign to every employee, every day, throughout the day; but pro-union employees can campaign only on break time. Furthermore, management can post anti-union propaganda on bulletin boards and walls — while prohibiting pro-union employees from doing the same. By law, employers can force workers to attend mass anti-union propaganda events. Not only are pro-union employees not given equal time, but they can be forced to attend on condition that they not ask any questions. Recent data show that workers are forced to attend between five and 10 such one-sided meetings. If, during the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democrats could have forced every voter in America to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 (or if the Republicans could have forced everyone to watch the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth video), with no opportunity for response from the other side, none of us would have called this "democracy."
What does this mean in practice? American Rights at Work has a timeline of one anti-union campaign:
July 16, 2007 | Employees begin meeting to discuss forming a union to improve compensation and address the safety concerns from working with serious psychiatric patients. |
August 2-3 | Supervisors interrogate employees to determine who is behind the union effort. |
August 2 | Company fires two union supporters. |
August 3 | With a majority of employees signing union authorization cards, the Service Employees International Union petitions the NLRB to hold an election, which the agency scheduled for September. |
August 6 | Company fires third union supporter. |
August 7 | Company fires fourth union supporter. |
August 7 | Company calls the police to stop a union representative who was legally handing out information to employees on a public road. |
August 10 | A supervisor swerves his car within feet of an employee legally handing out union information and threatens to call the police if they don’t stop. |
Right now, 30% of employers illegally fire workers during union organization drives; 23% of workers in majority sign-up elections, the kind the EFCA would allow, "report management coercion to oppose the union"; and 46% report similar coercion in what WalMart and their allies would like you to call "secret ballot" elections.
Does this sound like democracy? Like a process we should give employers the continued ability to enforce on workers? Because there's your "secret ballot."