Author Mark Mix is President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and National Right to Work Committee.

‘Card Checks’: Fast Track To Monopoly Unionism
Law That Would Further Entrench This Big Labor Tactic Is Just What the Public Doesn’t Want

Current federal labor law prohibits employees who do not wish to join in a union, but work for a unionized business, from bargaining with their employer for themselves.  Under American traditions of limited government, affiliation with private organizations is, the vast majority of the time, a purely personal decision.  But under federal labor law and the labor laws of most states, union affiliation is primarily a collective, rather than a personal, decision.

In America, your decision to contribute your household’s money to a charity, a political campaign, or an issue-oriented lobbying organization is made individually, or together with your spouse or solicitor.  Your neighbors, fellow employees, or business associates may offer advice, but do not get the chance to vote on which private groups you support or don’t support.

But U.S. labor laws empower pro-union employees who constitute the majority within a government-delineated “bargaining unit” to force other employees within that unit who don’t want a union to accept a particular union as their “exclusive” (monopoly) bargaining agent in dealings with their employer.  Furthermore, once a monopoly-bargaining agent is in place, under federal law it and the employer are legally authorized to agree to fire employees who refuse to pay monthly dues or fees to the union.

Apologists for current labor laws typically cite the “majority rule” principle as the rationale for forcing unwanted union monopoly bargaining and forced union dues or fees on employees who don’t wish to join a union.  But under our constitutional system, majority rule normally controls only the affairs of government or the internal affairs of a private association.  The invocation of majority rule to force unwilling persons into membership in or financial support for a private organization is not normally accepted.

For example, the decision by the majority of businesses based in a small town to join and pay dues to the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t give them the legal power, under any federal or state statute, to force the remaining businesses to join or pay dues.

Opinion polls have shown for many years that the general public overwhelmingly opposes monopoly bargaining in principle.  Monopoly bargaining is well-entrenched as a matter of law, but whether it is sound policy is another matter completely.  It is certainly unpopular with the American people.

One recent demonstration of this unpopularity is a December 2006 nationwide scientific survey conducted by veteran pollster Del Ali and his firm Research 2000.  It posed this question:

As you know, labor unions are permitted to represent all employees in a company unit.  Do you believe that employees who do not want to be represented by a labor union should or should not have the right to bargain for themselves?

The Research 2000 poll found that 81% of Americans who regularly vote in statewide elections believe that employees in unionized businesses who do not want to be union-represented should retain the right to bargain for themselves.  Just 17% of regular voters in statewide elections believe employees should not have that right, while 2% are unsure.

The top item on Big Labor’s legislative wish list for the 2007-2008 Congress is designed to enable union organizers to secure monopoly-bargaining power over millions of now-independent private-sector employees. 

In contrast to the American people as a whole, Big Labor is vehemently for monopoly bargaining.  Not only that, union officials and their apologists want far more of it.  In 2007, according to U.S. Labor Department data, 8.87 million private-sector workers were under union monopoly-bargaining control.

A measure introduced in the current U.S. Congress as H.R. 800 and S. 1041 is clearly designed to greatly increase that number.  H.R. 800 and S. 1041 are sponsored, respectively, by pro-forced unionism Congressman George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).  Mr. Miller and Mr. Kennedy cynically label their legislation as the “Employee Free Choice Act.”

The Miller measure was rubber-stamped on March 1, 2007, by a 241-185 House majority, with a coalition of Big Labor and Big Labor-appeasing representatives supporting the bill.  Less than four months later, on June 27, 51 out of the 100 senators voted to cut off debate on, and thus clear the way for passage of, H.R. 800.  However, H.R. 800 did not secure the 60 votes need to prevent Right to Work allies from continuing the debate.  Consequently, Miller-Kennedy has yet to steamroll the Senate.

Key provisions in the Miller-Kennedy legislation, more accurately labeled as the “Card-Check” Forced-Unionism Bills, would effectively ban employee secret-ballot elections over unionization in the private sector and replace such elections with so-called “card checks.”
 
Card-check organizing empowers union officials to force a business’s employees to accept a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent solely through the acquisition of signed unionization cards.  Big Labor may resort to deceit or intimidation to get individual employees to sign themselves, and, ultimately, all of their nonunion fellow employees, over to union-boss control.  Authorization cards are typically signed while workers are standing under the peering eyes of union organizers.

Card-check organizing is already a favorite Big Labor tactic, but as yet isn’t mandated by federal law.  Law abiding employers who do not want their independent-minded employees to be subject to union monopoly rule may currently insist that all affected employees at least get the chance to hear why unionization may not be in their best interests and to vote in a secret-ballot election before a union is granted “exclusive” bargaining privileges.

But the Miller-Kennedy legislation would eliminate that small safeguard.  Consequently, during unionization drives, only the views workers express while being monitored by union officials would count.

Forced-unionism apologists sometimes concede that, in principle, secret-ballot elections are fairer than “elections” in which your “vote” is monitored by agents of one of the opposing parties.

In an August 2001 letter to Mexican government officials who oversee labor policy in the state of Puebla, Rep. Miller, the lead House sponsor of the Card-Check Forced-Unionism Bill, and 15 other Big Labor congressmen and women wrote that “the secret ballot is absolutely necessary” in union recognition drives.  Without the secret ballot, they explained, workers may be “intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose.”

And in the U.S. as well as in Mexico, union officials insist that unionized employees be given a chance to vote in a secret-ballot election before a union is decertified, even if most have already signed a petition opposing the union.  Indeed, the AFL-CIO hierarchy actually joined a 1998 brief to the National Labor Relations Board that, approvingly citing federal court precedents, criticized decertification petitions and cards as “‘not comparable to the privacy and independence of the voting booth.’”

The union lawyer-authored brief forcefully argued that the secret-ballot “election system provides the surest means of avoiding decisions which are ‘the result of group pressures and not individual decision[s].’”  And just last year, union lobbyists strongly opposed, and Big Labor-backed Democrats unanimously voted against, a committee amendment to H.R.800 sponsored by Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) that would have mandated card checks for decertification campaigns, just as H.R. 800 itself mandates them for unionization drives.

Clearly, AFL-CIO and other union officials are not pushing hard to advance and ultimately enact Miller-Kennedy out of a sincere, albeit bizarre, belief that card checks are somehow more fair than secret-ballot elections. 

Instead, Big Labor is obviously acting on the belief that enactment of Miller-Kennedy will enable to union organizers to secure monopoly-bargaining power over millions, perhaps even tens of millions, of now-independent private-sector employees.

But, as the Research 2000 poll cited above shows indisputably, Americans overwhelmingly oppose union monopoly bargaining, period.  The public certainly has no interest in backing legislation designed to help Big Labor grab monopoly-bargaining privileges over millions of additional workers.

If today’s congressional leaders were responsive to the wishes of the public, they would be seeking to roll back current federal policies that authorize union monopoly bargaining and replace them with polices that authorize union officials to represent only employees who voluntarily join a union in contract negotiations.

H.R. 800 and S. 1041, which would further entrench monopoly bargaining in the American workplace, are exactly what the public doesn’t want.