Labor Issue – Card Check or Secret Ballot?

Labor unions have pressured the Democratic majority to block the compacts currently before the Assembly unless new language is inserted to allow for “card-checks” to make it easier for the Unions to organize. The compacts currently permit unions to organize through secret-ballot elections.

Are the Unions looking out for the employees…. or themselves?

The “card check” works like this. Instead of letting workers decide through the privacy of the ballot box, union organizers would ask them to sign union cards publicly. Once a majority of workers has signed, the union would be recognized -- without workers having the opportunity for a private vote.

This just doesn’t sound Democratic to me. Voting in private is a fundamental American right. The “card check” gives a HUGE advantage to the Unions. With card-check, unions know who has signed on. They send organizers to the homes of the remaining workers to press them to join. The organizers usually give the worker a one-sided pitch, deliberately avoiding anything that might make the worker less likely to join. They press the worker to commit without reflecting or hearing the other side. If a worker still decides not to sign, they simply revisit them again and again and again. They can keep coming round, day and night -- as often as it takes to pressure the holdouts into signing. Many workers admit they only signed to get the union off their backs. Workers at the New Otani hotel in Los Angeles had to get a court injunction to stop groups of eight to 10 union organizers from harassing them on their porches late at night. One employee in Louisiana actually had an arrest warrant issued against a union organizer after that organizer visited his home eight times. Another employee reported that union organizers shot videotape of him outside his home. He thought he was being marked for potential violence. Union officials in Las Vegas told MGM Grand employees that, once the union was recognized, they would fire all the people who didn’t sign the cards. United Steelworkers instructed its organizers to tell migrant workers they would report them to immigration officials if they didn't join the union.

Labor unions once stood for the rights of working Americans. But as union membership has fallen, they've grown increasingly desperate to recruit more dues-paying members. Card-check deprives workers of their privacy and their right to vote, but that makes it much easier to press workers into unionizing.

There is something fundamentally anti democratic about a card check election. Even a majority of union members recognize that. In a 2004 Zogby International poll, done for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 53 percent of union members say they would prefer to keep the secret ballot election. Moreover, the National Labor Relations Board, the US Supreme Court, and various federal courts have recognized that the card check is inferior to the secret ballot election. The privacy of the ballot box protects casino employees from threats or retaliation for voting against the Unions.

On a side note, in February of this year, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled that tribes must comply with federal labor laws. The opinion against the San Manuel tribe held that Indian casinos should be treated as commercial, rather than government, operations under the National Labor Relations Act. Assemblyman Alberto Torrico said in reference to this ruling that it ”… basically pre-empts state and local governments from entering into labor relations with tribes so even if we were to try to impose some language in the compact, I don't think it would be legally enforceable.” Moreover, he said, the decision means that tribal employees “have the same rights and protections that any other employee in the country has when it comes to organizing.”

Casino employees have had the right to organize since the original compacts took effect and no union has made any effort to organize them. So why now? My opinion is that the Unions, because of their diminishing memberships, are using these compacts and their history of being allies with the Democrats to bolster their own existence. I think they should fold their “cards" and leave the table.

Sources:

http://blog.nam.org/archives/2007/05/card_check_dont.php
http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20070504-085841-2327r.htm
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20070608-9999-1n8compacts.html
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/28/democracy_at_the_ballot_box