Card Check and Gut Check

[Earth Bound Misfit]

X-posted in Editorials & Other Articles

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=448626&mesg_id=448626

By Harold Meyerson
Thursday, May 14, 2009

If our nation was governed by business's version of democratic choice, we would hold elections to determine the winner, but nearly half the time the incumbent would remain in power even if he lost.

In its campaign to derail the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), business has fearlessly depicted itself as the defender of elections and the secret ballot as well as the foe of the dread "card check" -- the process, championed by unions and included within EFCA, that would allow workers to sign union affiliation cards rather than compelling them to go through a ratification election in which harassment and firings of workers are all too common.

But the kind of democratic choice that business favors is choice without consequence -- a position made clear by its opposition to the other key component of EFCA: binding arbitration between company and union if they've been unable to agree on a contract within 120 days of a union winning the election. A study of first-contract negotiations by John-Paul Ferguson and Thomas A. Kochan of MIT's Sloan School of Management makes clear why such arbitration is needed. After surveying 22,000 unionization campaigns between 1999 and 2004, the authors found that even after a majority of workers voted for a union, they actually reached a contractual agreement with management (which is currently under no legal obligation to come to an agreement) only 56 percent of the time.

Heads, management wins. Tails, the employees lose.

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Labor, Harkin and his fellow liberals are willing to make changes to EFCA to win the support of their Democratic colleagues, so long as those changes don't perpetuate management's ability to avoid unionization by threatening workers and refusing to negotiate contracts. Accordingly, the scramble is underway for modifications to card check and binding arbitration that still meet labor's goals.

snip

Among the suggested alternatives to card check are proposals to shorten the currently open-ended period between the request for election and the actual vote (today, management can stall a vote almost indefinitely) and to allow workers to vote by mailing their ballots to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, which (like absentee voting) would preserve the secret ballot but enable workers to escape the regimen of threats they often encounter in the weeks preceding an election.

If, after all the negotiations, Harkin and the unions conclude that the only bill that's enactable in this congressional session is too watered down to protect workers trying to unionize, they would, understandably enough, not want it to go forward. In that case, why don't the Democrats just put the original bill -- card check, binding arbitration and all -- to a vote and see which of their members choose to go on record against protecting those workers? If Specter and his fellow waverers wish to avoid that vote and the wrath it would incur among their onetime union backers, they'd do well to support the alternative provisions that restore Americans' rights in the workplace.