The House Democrats passed the “Employee Free Choice Act of 2007” with a margin of 54 votes on Thursday. The misleadingly named bill gets rid of the secret ballot process when employees vote on whether or not to unionize.
By a By a 241-185 vote Thursday, the House passed a bill to modify the National Labor Relations Act to allow employees to bypass a secret ballot election and instead unionize by gathering “check cards” with signatures from a majority of employees in the workplace.
The bill, called the “Employee Free Choice Act of 2007,” would be the most significant change in the law since 1947, labor experts say. It would also impose stiffer penalties on employers who violate union protections under the law, and force contract negotiations into binding arbitration if the employer fails to agree on a contract with a newly formed union within 90 days.
So, instead of making their decision in the privacy and safety of the voting booth, employees will be forced to stand before union organizers who have a vested interest in how they vote and make their decision publicly. How safe would any employee who wished to vote against the union feel if the union organizer was one of those 300 pound thugs that seem to show up every time there is a strike? You know, the ones who use baseball bats to smash the cars of people who decide they need their paycheck and cross the picket line? The ones who call people in the middle of the night and threaten to harm wives, children, and other family members?
But not everyone believes the check card option is free of its own exploitation by union leaders. Jen Jason, a former organizer for UNITE-HERE union in Florida, told Congress in February that she was a witness to “disgraceful practices” on the part of union organizers, particularly in regard to the check card process.
She said after four years of going to potential union members’ homes and persuading them to sign check cards in favor of union membership, she felt she and other organizers had devised expedient but unethical ways to get signatures, often by pressing key emotional buttons with employees.
Typically, workers she approached had no idea a union effort was even underway in their workplace, and they made for easy targets, she told the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions of the House Education and Labor Committee.
“Frankly, it isn’t difficult to agitate someone in a short period of time, work them to the point where they are feeling very upset, tell them that I have the solution, and that if they simply sign a card, the union will solve all their problems,” said Jason.
“I know many workers who later, upon reflection, knew that they had been manipulated and asked for their card to be returned to them,” she added. “The union’s strategy, of course, was never to return or destroy such cards, but to include them in the official count towards the majority.”
Emotional manipulation is the nice way that union organizers get you to vote them in. This is what the National Center for Policy Analysis says:
Union violence is a bigger problem in this country than most people realize, say observers. This is result of current federal law, which largely exempts unions from responsibility for violent behavior.
- Some 9,000 attacks against workers by their colleagues have been documented in recent decades.
- New York’s Daily News strike in 1990 saw 500 instances of striker violence.
- Recently, during the strike by the Teamsters Union against United Parcel Service, colleagues stabbed a driver with an ice pick.
The Supreme Court has held that the 1946 Hobbs Act, designed to stop violence related to labor disputes, didn’t apply to efforts aimed at achieving “legitimate union objectives.” Thus the FBI cannot investigate, nor the U.S. Department of Justice prosecute, such crimes — while local prosecutors lack jurisdiction in labor-related disputes covered by federal law.
Union backers say that the purpose of this legislation is to prevent employers from keeping employees who want to unionize from doing so. That sounds all good and everything, but the truth of the matter is:
- Union membership has been declining for years. Only about 10% to 12% of the American workforce is currently unionized.
- Each and every union, without exception, spends union dues making contributions to Democrat political campaigns and causes, without the approval of its members.
- The Democrats have considered the unions a political base for years, and would do anything to make them happy.
The simple fact is, the Democrats are doing anything they can to regain their political power. The Democrats in the House feel that if they can get this passed and signed into law, their political base will grow as union membership grows.
I’ve always felt that in the beginning, unions were a good idea. Before the unions started, workers were being taken advantage of and were forced to work under terrible conditions. Unions were formed to fix that, and they did. Problem is, with their reason for existence eliminated by mandated federal regulations regarding working conditions (think OSHA), union leaders had to find a reason to continue collecting dues money from the workers. So, the unions morphed into a political wing of the Democrat Party. Union leaders raised and donated millions of dollars as well a delivering votes for Democrats across the country, and in return Democrats generally supported every union proposal that came down the line. Its a cozy little relationship that everyone in the country knows exists.
Trouble is, not everyone who is a member of a union is a Democrat. That’s because in a union shop, you can’t get a job unless you join the union. It doesn’t matter if you agree with their aims or not, you have to join. Therefore, their are a lot of Republicans and Libertarians in unions against their will who are being forced to donate portions of their salary (called dues) to Democrat candidates and causes. Currently, they have no say in how the union doles out membership dues to political causes. Union leaders at the top decide for everyone in the back of a smoke-filled room at Union headquarters.
The good news is, this will have to be passed by the Senate before it can go anywhere, and Republicans in the Senate have already said they will stop the bill from passing. Of course, the Democrats will probably tack it on to some other bill to try to sneak it through, but let’s wait and see if they have the guts to do it.
