Posted by
Always To The Right on Thursday, February 05, 2009 2:58:13 PM
Ed Frank
got a chance to ask John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, a couple of
questions about the Employee Free Choice Act at a rally for the Card
Check legislation yesterday, as well as another union official. The
rally talked endlessly about how Card Check would protect workers and
allow employees to form unions, but Ed never got an explanation of how
the secret ballot manifests itself as an unfair labor practice. He
didn’t get any clarification from his interviews, either:
Organized labor claims that secret-ballot elections lead
to intimidation by employers, but if 90% of workers signed cards when
confronted by union organizers in dark parking lots or in vacant break
rooms and then only a very slim majority actually voted to unionize
when those union operatives couldn’t see their votes, doesn’t that
prove that union intimidation is much worse than employer intimidation?
We asked that simple question to two union officials at the rally,
including AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Not surprisingly, neither
were really able to answer the question.
In fact, Ed’s logic seems unassailable. If union activists get 90%
of workers to sign these cards but can’t get a majority in a secret
ballot — in which neither the union nor the employer knows how each
individual voted — the problem of intimidation appears to occur more on
the union side than the employer side. The two officials start
blathering on about access to information, but clearly the union gets
plenty of access if they get 90% of the workers to sign cards.
The unions want Card Check not because they want to end intimidation, but because they want to rely on it.