Workplace Facade Democracy

Presently a bill aimed to amend the National Labor Relations Act, is being considered in the United States Congress. With their usual gift for warping terms to convey the opposite meaning of what they were intended to, the sponsoring members of congress have, in  a moment of unusually malicious clarity,  titled the bill ”The Employee Free Choice Act“. The bill essentially amends the rules of requirements for forming exclusive unions in work-places, displacing the balance of power in favor of the unions, vis-a-vis the employer, but ALSO vis-a-vis the individual employee. As it is now, a union can be formed and certified as the exclusive union of the workplace, if a majority of employees vote in favor of forming the union. The vote can either be performed by gathering signatures (“card-check”), that is open vote, or by secret ballot. But the employer can require that the vote be conducted by secret ballot, which is relevant if there is suspicion that individual employees may be harrased into voting in favor of forming the union, against their wishes (which means that most unionizations at present are being decided by secret ballot). Not surprisingly, this is how the unions present it:

It’s Time to Restore Workers’ Freedom to Form Unions

America’s working people are struggling to make ends meet these days and our middle class is disappearing. The best opportunity working people have to get ahead economically is by uniting to bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits. Recent research has shown that some 60 million U.S. workers would join a union if they could.

But the current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken. Every day, corporations deny workers the freedom to decide for themselves whether to form unions to bargain for a better life. They routinely intimidate, harass, coerce and even fire workers who try to form unions and bargain for economic well-being. 

 

In the usual contradictory matter, for unions, or any other protagonist of similar ideological breed, freedom is a dish that is served at gun-point. The guiding tenet seems to be ”First we design a system that is fair and equal for all, but if it does not deliver the results that we anticipated and feel entitled to, we better stack the decks in our favor!”. The Employee Free Choice Act will strip the employer of the right to require secret ballots, which means that the unions are left much wider room for pushing through a card-check vote, with all the pier pressure and harrasment that may now easily be brought to bear upon the defenseless recalcitrant employee. I read about this first a few months ago at Reason.com, which also warned about the prospect for the influence of union thugs, with the advent of a united democratic congress and presidency.

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The bill, which has appropriately been nick-named “The Employee Forced Choice Act” by its detractors, will probably not pass in the current congress. But if Obama, the only presidential candidate who is for the bill, wins the presidency, there is indeed a very good chance of the bill being passed.

The bizarre part of the matter is that it is being sponsored by a group of Democrats who in the past opposed it strongly, as it was deemed as an encroachment upon workers rights. By any conceivable, generally accepted democratic standards, card-check would be anathema – secret ballots is a minimum requirement for any aspiring democratic country, and the grotesque paradox is that the left-wing would be the first to point to this fact. It would instantly be dismissed as a sham. Talk about double-standards. It isn’t even as if one can argue that the current system is ineffective on behalf of the unions – the unions win over 50% of the ballots in workplaces, even as it is now. I consider most (of the so-called red) unions to be a sort of corrupt left-over from pre-modern societies (think of the Guild-system of the middle-ages), but nowhere in the world is this more true than in the US, where their history is much more violent and criminal than it is here (Scandinavia) (stories are widespread of mob-connections among e.g. the Teamsters, harrasment of employees, and even acts of terrorism, long ago). Secret ballots is a way of securing that unions continue to operate within a civilized framework.

With the economic and technological development in the western world, gradually eliminating the tough jobs and austere working conditions of, say the 19th century and beginning of 20th, we should be moving towards an era of declining union influence and activity, not the opposite! Why do the think union membersip is declining in most western countries…?

Read more here, here, and here.