Secret Ballots

Secret Ballots

You are rather appreciative of voting by secret ballot, aren't you? It hasn't always been this way. In the early Republic, voting was done rather publicly. I'm not ashamed of who I vote for--but then again, I'm not worried about losing my job for voting wrong. (Oh well, right now that's not a problem.) I can remember in 1964 hearing friends of my parents express concern that their employers were attempting to pressure them into voting for Goldwater, not Johnson. (Yes, there was a time when employers were conservatives, not liberals or progressives.) Certainly, the secret ballot is an important method of protecting people at the bottom from being intimidated by employers.

So when I read this New York Post article by Dr. John Lott about an effort to abolish the secret ballot, I thought, "Wow! I'll bet the AFL-CIO will do everything it can to prevent this!" But alas, the AFL-CIO is who is pushing to abolish the secret ballot--at least for elections to decide whether workers will be represented by a union or not.

Just to be sure about this, I went and read the version that went nowhere in Congress last year, proposing to amend 29 USC 159(c):

(6) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, whenever a petition shall have been filed by an employee or group of employees or any individual or labor organization acting in their behalf alleging that a majority of employees in a unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining wish to be represented by an individual or labor organization for such purposes, the Board shall investigate the petition. If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).

Now, I can somewhat understand the argument that if a majority of the workers have signed union cards, then perhaps there's no need for a union election. (Hence the bill's description of this as "streamlining" the process.) But according to Dr. Lott, the union only wins these elections about 60% of the time. Huh? If a majority are willing to sign union cards, why would a majority not vote for the union at election?

There are actually a number of reasons, some of which reflect poorly on the employer, and some on the union. For example, a company might lean on employees, and remind them of the bad things that might happen if the union becomes the bargaining unit. Or perhaps some workers might find themselves fired or laid off. (Not related to their union organizing, of course. That would be illegal.)

But from my experiences, and that of many others that I know, I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):

Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.

I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can't you go to work anyway?"

"Not if you want to live."

And unfortunately, this wasn't just his imagination. There's a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion. Extortion means that you are getting something that you don't have a right to get--while higher wages obtained through such violence was a legitimate union bargaining tactic. The Court may have actually come to the right conclusion, based on the legal definition of extortion and the legislative intent of the Hobbs Act--but it does show you something of how labor unions get things done.

I had a friend in California who grew up in Michigan. His father was a UAW local official. He remembered vividly being in a coffee shop with his family one day. The guy in the next booth made some remark to a companion that was uncomplimentary to the union--and my friend's father instinctively swung his coffee mug around and shattered it on this guy's jaw.

There's a long and ugly, bloody, deadly history of corporations and labor unions fighting it out in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There's plenty of evil that was done by both sides. But this is not the situation today--not even close. Labor violence today is almost entirely by labor unions. I can easily believe that the reason that the AFL-CIO wants to "streamline" the process is that they are intimidating workers into signing authorization cards--and don't dare risk a secret ballot.