There are ads running in Oregon ragging on the Dem Senatorial candidate for voting against a law that would require secret ballots when voting for union representation. I know as a liberal I’m supposed to support unions (even though historically they were a bunch of racist thugs), but I can’t see the downside of secret ballots. Can anyone explain?
I believe it’s to eliminate the supposed burden of conducting an election on a single day. If the secret ballot is eliminated the unions can just have the workers sign cards indicating their desire for a union, and if enough employees sign up, the union is ratified. Kind of using a petition drive instead of an election.
There are no downsides to secret ballots, unless, of course, you (whoever you are) want to see who votes in what way, which is intimidation - and it works, especially in union votes.
“The ballot”, as it was was once known, has always been hated by powers that want to control the outcome of any given vote, and to know who “the enemy” is.
-
If you’re a Liberal, you don’t support anything unthinkingly.
-
Oh look! ‘Racist thugs’ :rolleyes: :smack:
More racist thuggery by unions!
The ballot is open because management has been known to stuff ballot boxes.
The ballot is open because union organizers have been known to stuff ballot boxes.
Most importantly, the ballot is open because, in my experience, most people in the plant are pretty damn up-front about whether they’ll vote the union in or not. So an open ballot lets you know who got to whom, especially when you need to turn over a certain percentage of signed cards to prompt an election in the first place.
When you organize a shop, it takes months, if not years, and if, come election time, the guys who have been on your side for all that time, driving you to people’s houses, introducing you to influential guys in the shop, etc., turn around and vote “no,” then you know management got to them.
They’re running those commercials here in Mississippi, too.
Of course, I have watched carefully, and in only one of the three commercials I have seen so far is “union” mentioned. The evil ex-governor who is running for Senate is trying to take away the secret ballot!
-Joe
That same commercial is being run in Oregon, Maine, Minnesota, and Mississippi (changing the name & image to the appropriate Democratic Senate candidate in each state). Probably more will be added.
The ad is produced & paid for by a front group from the Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group. It’s basically all lies. Employees can form a union either by voting for it in a secret ballot, or by having a majority of the workers sign a card choosing to form a union – but currently, the employer gets to choose which one of these is used. This law would change that, to give that choice to the employees.
It is favored by the unions, and opposed by company management.
I have been both union and managment, and now am union again. Secret ballot is the only way to go. Everything else leads to intimidation.
Agreed. Just because a majority of employees have signed a card doesn’t mean that a majority of people actually want to be in a union. I only had two jobs where there was an option to join a union. The only pressure I felt was from the unions, never from the employers.
Well, I’m a bit disturbed by this as well - doesn’t the union collect the cards and encourage people to sign? This activity has been rife with intimidation in the past as well.
You’re measuring the secret ballot against the cards as proof of management intimidation (which is certainly possible) but different circumstances might equally make it proof of intimidation by the union at the card check level.
In any case, I’m at a loss to explain to workers how they rate secret ballots everywhere but on their shop floor. It’s just that simple to me.
Does the law stipulate what method the employees would use to select secret ballot or card, or is it turtles all the way down?
I don’t know the details of the law, but it should be available at the Congress website.
I know that current law is that if 30% of the employees sign the cards requesting to join the union, a secret ballot election must be held. I had heard that under this new law, if more than 50% sign cards asking to join the union, then that is already a majority, and they don’t need to hold the election. But I’m not sure if that is an accurate summary of the law.
How do you know that they voted “no”? It’s a secret ballot, isn’t it?
I had thought that the card-signing option was opposed by management because it can be a months-long operation, and people can sign the cards anywhere–at home, at a bar, wherever somebody can convince (=threaten?) them. The running total accumulates gradually.
Ballot boxes on a specific election day, held on company property, are more limited, and the results are known immediately.
Am I off-base?
I, for one, appreciate the hundreds of thousands of dollars management is spending to protect ignorant workers from those manipulative unions.
All czarcasm aside, it isn’t hard to believe that in a tough unionization fight intimidation could come from many different quarters. So I’m wondering why you suggest these particular elections - one which can cause high emotions and occasionally individual retribution - ought to be the ones where workers aren’t provided the protection of privacy?
At least, that was what I gathered from your remark. If I’m wrong, please let me know.
I’ve been a union organizer for upwards of 5 years now. I can honestly say I have never witnessed or heard about a co-worker or member organizer threatening or coercing someone to sign a card against his or her will. Does it happen? I suspect. However, if unions regularly were putting illegal and unwanted pressure on workers to sign cards, don’t you think more than 12% of the workforce would be unionized right now? Unions-- i.e. their members and their staff-- are not the bullies and thugs we’re made out to be. In fact, most of my co-workers are bleeding-heart pacifists.
With unions’ resources so limited-- and the Bush NLRB so stacked in favor of business-- we can’t afford to waste our time on worksites that don’t really want a union. We aren’t looking to force people to sign cards “just to get a union.” When most unions organize a worksite (and I can’t speak to all unions-- I know there are turds to be found in organized labor), we are looking for people that REALLY want a union. If we threaten people (as chappachula alluded to), we would be slapped with an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) faster than you could say “Unfair Labor Practice.” Not to mention, it’s 10 times easier to decertify a union than it is to certify one; that means if we don’t truly have strong support from the workers, they’ll be gone in a year. Why would we waste our time and resources on a flash in the pan like that?
Finally, right now, workers trying to organize are at a huge disadvantage. Businesses have complete access to their workers, to scare them, fire them and harrass them if they support forming a union. As a union organizer, I’ve got virtually no access to the workers whatsoever, and any access I may have is extremely limited. So, under the current NLRB election process, many workers might support the formation of a union, but they constantly feel like their job is at risk if they support it. Once that 30% of cards is filed with the NLRB, and an election is scheduled, management starts an all-out anti-union campaign where they set out to scare the shit out of the workers. They fire supporters, harrass supporters, tell workers they’ll have to go on strike, tell them that the company will close if they unionize, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on anti-union PR and law firms.
Now, a lot of what they do is illegal, but every company knows that the penalty for breaking the law in this case is merely having to post notices that they broke the law and that they won’t do it again; many guilty companies don’t even post this in areas where their workers are located. And that’s it. No restitution, no re-hiring of fired employees. Union campaigns, contrary to what many in the public seem to think, are stacked heavily in favor of the company. Like I said earlier, if unions were as tough and thuggish as we’re made out to be, always coercing poor Joe Six Pack to sign a card, a hell of a lot more than 12% of the workforce would belong to unions.
If workers don’t want a union, and don’t want to sign a card, they won’t, no matter how much pressure another person puts on them. Knowing that, organizers don’t waste their time with anti-union workers. And going to a 50-percent-plus-one card-check system (spelled out in EFCA) won’t give unions any unfair advantage-- we still won’t have any real access to the workers, and we still can’t force anyone to sign a card (that would be illegal and would ultimately resort the campaign back to an NLRB election). EFCA will, however, neutralize management’s often-times illegal anti-union campaign that takes place prior to an election.
The way things are now, come election day, all the company has to do is bus their anti-union workers to the polling site, and on the flip side, instruct supervisors to make it difficult for known supporters to make it to vote. Happens all the time.
Ultimately, unions aren’t against *secret * ballots, we’re against ballots that are cast in a system that’s completely stacked to favor management. Right now, a mere 1% of the workforce could cast a ballot in a union election, and decide whether all of the workers there have a union or not. However, under the Employee Free Choice Act, it would require 50% + 1 of ALL workers to certify the union. To me that sounds more democratic than having an election with 200 people show up out of a unit of 2000.