Dog Licks Dog.

Sun Rises.

Ice cream falls from cone to ground.

Labor leader writes a misleading and blatantly-omissive article about the push against the “Employee Free Choice Act”.

Look, I’m not anti-union.  Indeed, unlike most DFLers, I’ve actually been a union member.  I’m a firm believer in collective bargaining – and the right of people to opt out of collective bargaining.  Unions give leverage to groups of workers.  They have their downsides as well – which we’ll go into some other time.

You’ve heard of the EFCA; the DFL in a flurry of publicity, sued the Coleman campaign for “lying” about the bill (and got their case promptly tossed for, um, failing to show a single “lie”).

I keep wanting to ask the proponents of the law – who write about the EFCA with the expected gauzy soft-focus – “What about the secret ballot?   Does your union reject intimidation of dissenters? ”
Bill McCarthy – in a piece apparently written before the courts euthanized the DFL’s lawsuit – writes:

In attacking the EFCA, opponents distort the facts and charge that the legislation would end secret ballot elections in union organizing drives. Not true.

Well, then!  We must be headed for some clarity!

The foundation of modern labor law, the Wagner Act of 1935, provided a path to union recognition when a majority of workers in a workplace signed union authorization cards — simple and fair.

And more or less secret.  Right?

When labor adversaries passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over President Truman’s veto, however, employers gained the right to reject the workers’ union authorization cards and to petition the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election to determine if a workplace should become union.

But the NLRB election process bears little resemblance to elections to choose our leaders for local, state and federal government. In the run-up to NLRB elections, employers pull out all the stops to intimidate workers into rejecting the union. These abuses are well-documented, including mandatory attendance at anti-union meetings, one-on-one meetings, threats to close the business if the union wins the vote, and even firing workers for pro-union activity.

So what?

Leave aside the screeching hypocrisy (unions did, and do, all of the above as well), a company’s got the right (or should have the right) to keep itself competitive.  Unions make them less so (or at least that’s the perception; in industries with less-elastic markets, it’s arguably less true, but then few markets stay inelastic for long these days).

The EFCA would give workers, not employers, the right to decide how to express the choice about going union: through the card-check process OR through the NLRB election process.

Ahem:  “What about the secret ballot?   Does your union reject intimidation of dissenters?”

If passed, the EFCA will help expand the number of workers who enjoy union wages and union benefits like health insurance and retirement plans.

(And will diminish the number of workers, period)

And, uh, what about the secret ballot?   Does your union reject intimidation of dissenters?

If passed, the EFCA will help expand the number of workers who have a voice on the job through their union.

Leaving aside whether that “voice” is one that workers really want speaking for them, I’ll try again; What about the secret ballot?   Does your union reject intimidation of dissenters?

Or to put it another way – Does your union reject intimidation of dissenters? What about the secret ballot?

Get back to me, Mr. McCarthy.  Thanks.

62 thoughts on “Dog Licks Dog.

  1. I’m a firm believer in collective bargaining Socialist! Why would you defend a marxist/socialist ideal like a union?

    It’s funny watching Minnesotans paint unions as cuddly, friendly clubs, no one on the east coast would buy this crap for a second. Try crossing a Teamsters picket line and they’ll beat the hell out of your truck, cross a stevador’s picket line and they will beat the hell out of you. (Even cops are afraid of the stevadors (dock workers) union.)

    Unions are groups of thugs that bully people to get their way. They kill companies about as often as they kill people.

    Say Hi to Jimmy Hoffa for me the next time you cross a union.

  2. Socialist! Why would you defend a marxist/socialist ideal like a union?

    Bollocks. Unions can be fundamentally market-driven entities. They are an effort to get profit from selling a supply of something – in this case, labor. No different than marketing and pricing pop or houses or firearms or computers, really.

    Unions aren’t “socialistic” until they get in bed with government; only government can make government socialistic.

    It’s funny watching Minnesotans paint unions as cuddly, friendly clubs, no one on the east coast would buy this crap for a second.

    Anyone who uses violence to get what they want – whether it’s an employer or a union – should have the law fall on them like a thousand tons of wet bricks.

    Unions are groups of thugs that bully people to get their way. They kill companies about as often as they kill people.

    And the problem with them is that in the thirties through the seventies they got government to carry their water for them. In fact, excessive union power almost killed the UK; the Labour party was essentially a front for big Brit labor, and thus the government was run from big labor’s offices.

    Say Hi to Jimmy Hoffa for me the next time you cross a union.

  3. That is why employers oppose this bill. They do not want workers to get the power to sit down as equals.

    No, employers and employees oppose this bill because they understand that unions use strong arm tactics to intimidate workers.

    While some employers may fire someone, some unions may break bones and damage property. Which is worse?

  4. Loren:

    As Mitch helpfully pointed out above. Violence is illegal we have perfectly good laws to protect us against it. In addition, employers have just as much opportunity to use violence against workers and they have a long record of doing it.

    Many employers actually do fire people, no one has yet cited an actual example of any union using violence during an organizing drive. I say deal with real problems.

  5. Many employers actually do fire people, no one has yet cited an actual example of any union using violence during an organizing drive.

    I cited three examples, among many I could have linked, above.

    I don’t want to (nor do I have the time to) be especially pedantic – but saying “unions always play nice” is either naive, or relies on a level of legalistic pointillism that makes communication really meaningless.

  6. Mitch:
    Of your three examples, one was fictional non-coercion, one was an ordinary legal dispute with no violence, one included violence unrelated to a union organizing drive.

    You object to the Employee Free Choice Act because you say it would allow a union to coerce someone during an organizing drive. I don’t see how it is legally pointillistic to point out you can not produce an example of such coercion. There are no such examples, not because labor unions free from sin, but because they have no legal power they could use to coerce and there is no way to make illegal coercion work either.

  7. People might be more sympathetic to this effort to make union creation easier (by circumventing the secret ballot) if they thought unions were an unalloyed good. Unfortunately for RickDFL and his ilk, most reasonable people realize unions can cause “real problems”, and don’t regard the current creation process as a “real problem” that needs to be solved. *shrug*

  8. Troy:
    I am sure you speak for those who like to live at the whim of corporate CEO’s. But the highly-paid messaging guys on your side do not think that your argument will work with a majority of Americans. That is why we get all this well-funded smoke and mirrors. They know Americans value unions.

  9. “That is why membership is declining.”

    Only in the private sector where corporations are able to violate the law and prevent organizing. In the public sector where the employer can be (mostly) forced to obey the law, union density has held steady.

    Just today you can read this story:
    “On June 30 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Wal-Mart illegally fired an employee in Kingman, Ariz., who supported the UFCW and illegally threatened to freeze merit-pay increases if employees voted for union representation. The decision came eight years after the organizing campaign failed, and four years after the case was originally heard.”

    The Employee Free Choice Act means workers will not have to rely on the Feds so much to protect their rights.

    As Matt Yglesias says:

    “Under these circumstances, union organizers have no effective legal recourse to violations of labor law and employers have no incentive to actually follow the law. And since employees know the laws won’t be enforced if broken, employers only relatively rarely need to actually break the law in order to get the correct intimidating threat. Like the mafia, a company like Wal-Mart only needs to be seen to break a few kneecaps and get away with it for there to be an adequate intimidation effect to de facto deny a vast workforce its rights.”

    http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com

  10. union density has held steady.

    Must…restrain…self…I’m…better…than…this…almost…there…whew

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