-By Gerald D. Skoming, PalmBeachPost.com

For several years, organized labor has been waging an unprecedented campaign to totally federalize labor laws that have served our country well for more than 70 years. Unions are pulling out all the stops in support of the ironically titled Employee Free Choice Act (House Resolution 300), which would strip 140 million U.S. workers of the right to decide by secret ballot whether to unionize, or to decide once a contract is negotiated whether to ratify it.

Under the act, instead of an employee’s membership in a union being determined by a free and fair election, the union would become his or her official bargaining representative as soon as a simple majority of workers signed a petition or authorization cards asking the union to represent them. An equally nefarious provision of the bill would allow for the termination of collective bargaining negotiations between the employer and the union, and imposition of the terms of a new contract by an arbitrator.

This misguided legislation is transparent political payback for union support in the 2006 and 2008 elections that handed Democrats control of the Congress and the White House. The measure would make it far easier for organizers to coerce workers into joining a union, and into keeping the union once it arrives.

Union membership has been in sharp decline for decades. In the 1950s, 35”percent of private-sector employees were unionized. By the 1980s, it was 20 percent. Today, only 7.4 percent of non-agricultural private sector workers are unionized. So organized labor wanted to ensure victory for Barack Obama, who was a co-sponsor of the bill and made it a priority campaign issue. The AFL-CIO spent more than $58”million to elect Mr. Obama, and its member unions gave $200 million to local and national Democratic campaigns to seal the deal.

Labor leaders considered the 2008 election an urgent call to arms. As Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers remarked, “This election could be the last stand for the American worker.” More accurately, the 2008 election might be called the last stand for democracy in labor relations.

Unable to win enough worker support under current rules, organized labor has persuaded its Democratic “friends” to hijack the orderly union certification process by eliminating employees’ right to a secret ballot on whether they want a union to represent them. Unions already “win” between 55”percent and 65 percent of all National Labor Relations Board elections, but, apparently, that’s not good enough.

Union organizers are aggressive, well-trained salesmen. Many workers who succumb to the pressure-packed sales pitch and sign petitions or union cards under duress have second thoughts and vote no in the secret ballot election supervised by the NLRB. It is not uncommon for an organizer to present cards showing that 80 percent of the workforce wants to unionize, only to have that percentage plummet as workers hear “the rest of the story” about the downside of having a union shop – onerous dues, wage increases less than promised, layoffs, protracted strikes, and sometimes union corruption – and then have a chance to decide privately whether to accept or reject the union.

To be sure, democracy is often an inconvenient form of government. Just consider how expensive and protracted our process is for selecting a president. Secret ballot elections sometimes yield results with which its participants (including unions) may not be happy. But, as Winston Churchill famously observed, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.”

His simple message is one labor leaders and their Democratic friends in Congress apparently disagree with or don’t understand. Hopefully, Congress will reject the call to pay unions back for their support, and instead do what’s right for American workers, and for the future of labor relations by casting its own collective vote in favor of workplace democracy.

I wonder what Sir Winston would say if they do otherwise?

Gerald D. Skoning is a lawyer in Chicago who specializes in labor and employment law. He is a part-time resident of Juno Beach.

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