The flaw in ‘card check’

The Employee Free Choice Act contains worthy reforms, but it needs to preserve the secret ballot.

Congress fought back against the Depression and unemployment in the 1930s with the National Labor Relations Act, protecting employees who wanted to organize unions but who feared management retaliation. The pendulum swung away from labor in 1947 when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto. It has never swung back, and in fact, labor organizers have been stymied by a succession of regulatory restrictions and hostile National Labor Relations Board decisions that have helped undermine the 1935 act’s stated policy of encouraging collective bargaining to negotiate terms and conditions of employment.

Now Congress is considering a bill aimed at correcting the balance and affording employees real power to organize and participate in meaningful contract negotiations. One part of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 ought to be a no-brainer: adding teeth to today’s penalties against employers who improperly intimidate workers or engage in other unfair labor practices. If anything, that portion of the bill ought to be enhanced.

A second part, calling for an arbitrator to impose a two-year initial contract when negotiations and mediation fail, has drawn strong protest from business, which currently can drag out contract talks forever and thus negate employees’ decision to organize. Filibustering against a properly elected union is an abuse of the collective bargaining process, and binding arbitration is an appropriate way to stop it. Regulations would fine-tune the arbitrator’s role; rule makers ought to consider imposing either side’s last, best offer as a way to encourage both sides to be more realistic in their offers and make negotiations more productive.

These two reforms are too often dismissed as lesser components of this three-part bill. But they should not be overlooked. They’re crucial proposals that would swing the pendulum back and return some power to employees.

The third part of the bill is the one that troubles us. It would eliminate the secret-ballot elections that are used in most organizing campaigns and replace them with a method variously known as majority sign-up, petitioning or “card check.” This change would correctly take away from management the power to pick employees’ method of voting on whether to organize. But instead of returning that decision to the people who ought to have it — the employees — it would award it to a labor union, an outside third party that has the potential to become the employees’ representative in bargaining but isn’t yet, and shouldn’t be before the vote.

Read the rest at The L.A. Times.

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