Over at TAPPED, Ezra Klein digs up numbers to compare the intimidation, coercion, and pressure that workers experience during an NLRB union election versus in a card-check campaign -- wherein 50% plus one of workers sign a card that says they want the union to act as their collective bargaining representative. Getting card check is of the main goals of the Employee Free Choice Act, right now the topic of fiery debate in DC. American Rights at Work, Rutgers University, and two Jesuit Wheeling University professors surveyed 430 workers (pdf) who had gone through both union elections and card check. Remember, even today, employers can consent to card check. Some very big companies, too, have unionized this way, Cingular and Kaiser Permanente among them.
The main argument in favor of card check is that employees avoid pressure from anti-union employers. But the counter argument is, naturally, that we're trading employer harassment for intimidation at the hands of a union organizer.
So what did they find about re: intimidation, coercion, and pressure in NLRB elections vs. card check campaigns?
Well, the important caveat that pressure from your boss -- the folks who pay your mortgage and for your kids' lunches -- is qualitatively different than been goaded by union organizers. With that in mind, four times as many workers (22%) reported that management coerced them “a great deal" as opposed those who said the same about the union (6%). While 46% of workers who went through elections complained of management pressure, 14% of those who went through a card check campaign complained of union pressure. At 17% vs. 22%, fewer employees in card check campaigns felt pressure from coworkers to support the union than they did in elections. Fewer than one in twenty -- 4.6% -- workers who signed a card with a union organizer watching reported that the felt pressured from the organizer.
Listen, the specter of union bullying is probably one that those pushing for the resurrection of the labor movement are gonna have to deal with. I'd guess that there are many otherwise liberal-minded Americans who hold negative feelings towards unions -- either because they lived through the Hoffa years, had someone they know have a run-in with a corrupt or poorly-run local, or because they just see all the bad and little of the good of unions.
And all that thinking plays in nicely to the elections are sacred meme that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its allies are pushing hard as the Employee Free Choice Act nears a vote in the House. (It's looking like it might even come up for a vote next week.) Numbers be damned, their rhetoric revolves around this idea that if we do away with secret ballot elections, employees are going to be coerced and otherwise manipulated by labor forces. But if the Chamber et al are being honest, they have to cop to a strain of thinking among their allies voice by former Chamber economist and speechwriter Grover Norquist, who says its his dream to "crush labor as a political entity.”
The Chamber doesn't like the labor movement, and some business owners don't like unions. So much that they will resist them for years and years. And with card-check, we're talking about union drives that can be over and done with in two to four weeks. Compare that to the drive to unionize nurses, housekeepers, and other hospital workers out in Chicago that I highlighted a couple of weeks ago that is now in its fourth year, with no end in sight. (AFSCME organizers there told tale of an organizing drive of R.J. Reynolds employees that's been going on for something like 20 years, but I haven't tried to verify that.)
(Disclosure: I'm working with the AFL-CIO on the legislative push around the Employee Free Choice Act.)
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