A Good Steward of Democracy

by Glenn Spencer

In today’s Wall Street Journal, George McGovern speaks out on the Card Check legislation, although not in a way you might expect from a former Democratic presidential nominee.  Hopefully his party’s current leaders will value his wisdom:

As a longtime friend of labor unions, I must raise my voice against pending legislation I see as a disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor.

The legislation is called the Employee Free Choice Act, and I am sad to say it runs counter to ideals that were once at the core of the labor movement. Instead of providing a voice for the unheard, EFCA risks silencing those who would speak.

The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as "card-check." There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.
...
To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Some of the most respected Democratic members of Congress -- including Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, George Miller and Pete Stark of California, and Barney Frank of Massachusetts -- have advised that workers in developing countries such as Mexico insist on the secret ballot when voting as to whether or not their workplaces should have a union. We should have no less for employees in our country.

I worry that there has been too little discussion about EFCA's true ramifications, and I think much of the congressional support is based on a desire to give our friends among union leaders what they want. But part of being a good steward of democracy means telling our friends "no" when they press for a course that in the long run may weaken labor and disrupt a tried and trusted method for conducting honest elections.

Comments

[Mike Konopacki]

It's sad to see Senator McGovern supporting a corrupt and undemocratic "election" system under the pro-business, anti-labor NLRB. The EFCA wouldn't be necessary if the election process was in fact democratic.

If our political election system was like the NLRB, voters could get fired for joining a political party, they would be herded into "captive audience" meetings to hear the pro-business party bash the pro-labor candidate, and if the pro-labor candidate won, the vote would be contested for years.

"Corporate democracy" is no democracy at all, it's closer to China's form of capitalism. Ironically in China, Walmart's workers are allowed to join unions.