REMEMBER HOW SADDAM RID IRAQ OF INTIMIDATION AND ESTABLISHED FREE ELECTIONS?

Unions to Push to Make Organizing Easier (New York Times, 8/31/2003)

"The right of workers to make their own free choice to join a union has been effectively canceled in a huge majority of unionization elections," [AFL-CIO President John] Sweeney said....

As part of this campaign, the labor movement will contend that the right to form unions without intimidation — a right guaranteed by international convention — is routinely violated in the United States and that the government does little to protect that right.

"What we're seeing is a fundamental violation of people's human rights every single day," said Stewart Acuff, the federation's organizing director and the foremost advocate of this campaign. "Workers don't have the right to form a union."...

Ninety-two members of the House, almost all of them Democrats, have written Cintas, a Cincinnati corporation that is the nation's largest industrial laundry and uniform company, urging it to make it easier for its workers to form a union. Cintas is battling efforts to unionize 17,000 of its workers and labor's demands to let its workers organize by signing cards, rather than by a lengthy election process.

Officials at Cintas and many other companies say that they have a First Amendment right to oppose unionization and that it is fairer to gauge pro-union sentiment through an election rather than by signing cards.

To show his backing for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. campaign, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he would introduce a bill this week that would require companies to recognize unions once a majority of their workers signed pro-union cards in a process known as card check.

"It's become next to impossible to organize," Mr. Schumer said. "I asked union organizers what do you need to succeed, and they say card check."

Here, at the very end of the article, we get to the real issue. In elections by secret ballot, unions routinely lose; so they want a different method, in which union organizers can approach workers individually and, using their skills in the art of persuasion, get them to sign a card. Apparently, many workers who in the privacy of a voting booth would vote against unionization will, in the presence of union activists, sign a card. Thus, the card-check method works greatly to the unions' advantage.

To justify this new legal standard by which the government will coerce dissenting workers into a union, the unions claim that election by secret ballot represents "intimidation" against unions -- whereas signing a card while surrounded by union activists is a truly free act.

If this argument is really sound, what did the Left have against Pinochet and Franco, anyway?

Posted by Paul Jaminet at September 1, 2003 1:03 PM