Changes would open the door to coercion

By MARK MIX
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- To understand Big Labor, you have to know the code. For example, "making it easier for employees to organize" refers to top-down organizing tactics that deny employees any effective means of opposing unionization.
Under state and federal law, 12 million workers are already compelled to pay union dues to keep their jobs. But union officials believe that's not nearly enough. That's why union organizers nationwide are now battling to secure "exclusive" or monopoly bargaining privileges over groups of employees solely through the acquisition of "union authorization cards." This is what union officials call "helping" workers.
In previous decades, U.S. labor policy recognized that Big Labor's power to bargain on behalf of workers who choose not to join a union, as well as those who do, is extraordinary. That's why union officials normally had to clear the hurdle of a secret ballot election before receiving monopoly bargaining privileges.
But in recent years employees who have grown increasingly concerned about forced unionism abuses -- including featherbedding, wasteful work rules, job losses, union corruption, and political crusades -- have naturally also become less apt to vote for unionization. In response, Big Labor is resorting more and more frequently to coercive tactics known as "neutrality" and "card check" agreements.
Union officials pressure employers to grant them monopoly control over employees through card collection alone by battering them with negative PR blitzes, costly and embarrassing lawsuits, strikes, stockholder actions and political pressure.
Employers are often even pressured to help union organizers collect the cards by forcing workers to sit through one-sided "captive audience" speeches extolling unionization, as well as by giving union organizers sweeping access to company premises and employees' home addresses and phone numbers.
Home visits
Workers then receive unsolicited home visits from union operatives who browbeat them into signing cards. Next, the cards are counted as "votes" for unionization. Once union operatives gather signatures from a majority, the employer grants union officials monopoly bargaining power.
Responding to employee complaints from across the country, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys have filed numerous court challenges documenting illegal activities by union organizers -- including threats, bribes and stalking.
Workers often report they are lied to about the cards' purpose. Some are told they are merely health insurance enrollment forms, requests for an election, or even tax forms. And revoking a previously signed card can be next to impossible. For example, in 2000 a National Labor Relations Board official responding to an employee who asked how to get back a card he had signed under false pretenses said that the union was not required to return it or rectify union organizers' misrepresentations.
Last year, more than 80 percent of new union members were swept into union ranks through such top-down organizing tactics. One local chief of the Service Employees International Union bluntly confessed to The Wall Street Journal: "We don't do elections."
Legislation proposed by Big Labor allies in Congress, the comically misnamed "Employee Free Choice Act," would go even further. This bill would allow union bosses to acquire monopoly-bargaining privileges automatically, without the employer's acquiescence.
Rife with abuses
In principle, the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., knows "card check" organizing is rife with abuses.
Four years ago, Miller and many of his co-sponsors addressed this issue in a letter to a Mexican labor commission: "We feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary to ensure that (Mexican) workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose."
But Big Labor power, not principle, is Miller's concern now. Rather than dream up new ways to impose unionization on employees from the top down, union organizers should take a hard look at improving what they are selling.
X Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.