The Problem
Card Check Intimidation, Coercion, and Confusion
A secret ballot prevents most ills, since no one knows how an employee will vote or voted, irrespective of signing a card. Conversely, a serious flaw in the public card check process is that it is inherently rife with the potential for intimidation by union officials.
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UNITE HERE, a union of garment and hospitality employees whose leaders are dedicated to avoiding secret ballot elections, offers telling examples of inappropriate union activity that harms employers and employees.
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Everyone (Including Union Leaders) Prefers Real Elections
The public, the courts, leading editorial pages, and politicians all prefer secret ballot elections. When they’re acting as employers, union officials prefer secret ballots, too.
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Union Officials Elect for Hypocrisy
Given this level of public and media support for elections, some may be surprised by union officials’ campaign to take away secret ballots from working Americans. They may be more surprised to find that union officials seem to prefer elections when it comes to their own staff deciding whether to join a union.
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In a 1998 legal brief to the NLRB, the AFL-CIO criticized cards for decertification of a union because they were allegedly “not comparable to the privacy and independence of the voting booth.” Indeed, they stated that the “election system provides the surest means of avoiding decisions which are ‘the result of group pressures and not individual decisions.'”
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According to one leading labor expert, card check agreements with employers, and the “neutrality” clauses included in them, are frequently the result of union coercion. In 2004, former National Labor Relations Board member Charles Cohen testified before Congress: “In my experience, neutrality/card check agreements are almost always the product of external leverage by unions, rather than an internal groundswell from unrepresented employees.”
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Even as some U.S. politicians and union officials point to the ostensible “success” of Canadian labor laws, however, five provinces have actually implemented secret ballot voting since 1977.
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