Union membership in the private sector has been steadily declining. In the 1980s, it was 12.1%, today it is 7.5%. Union organizers are discouraged and want to change the playing field.
At the Democratic Convention in Denver, 25% of the delegates are union members or belong to households of union members. And they want the Democrats to re-write labor law.
To wit: They want a Democratic congress and a Democratic president to sign into law a card check bill (i.e., The Employee Free Choice Act), which would do away with secret ballot elections. Since unions have been losing the majority of secret ballot elections, they want an environment where workers can be intimidated into joining unions, which is what would happen with card checks.
Next on their agenda is the repeal of right-to-work laws that currently exist in 22 states. It doesn’t matter to unions that such states have proven to be more economically beneficial to workers than heavily unionized states. Such statistics have been published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Those states have higher employment figures, more rapidly growing GDP, and more job creation than their unionized cousins.
If the country winds up with a Democratic president and Democratic majority in both houses of congress, the union movement will not merely re-emerge, but it will dominate the workplaces of Corporate America.
According to an article in The New York Times, United Long Term Care Workers, a Los Angeles-based local of the hyper successful Service Employees International Union, has a president whose spending has raised more than eyebrows. It has raised shouts of outrage and indignation. According to annual reports filed with the Labor Department, the local has paid $177,000 to a video production company run by the wife of the local’s president, has paid $ 90,000 annually to a day care center run by the mother-in-law of the local’s president, and paid $16,000 to a basketball team coached by the brother-in –law of the local’s president.
The local represents 155,000 workers who earn approximately $9 an hour. And their local spent their dues as they pleased. Those workers must feel as if they have been conned.
This is another example of how unions, claiming to represent working class individuals, spend union dues. There should be more government oversight of union activities, not less. Unfortunately, those who want to pass The Employee Free Choice Act want to let the unions control the American workplace. The result will be greater union dominance, less freedom of choice for workers and management, and more dues paid into union treasuries. And we already have a idea of how those dues will be spent!
Stephen Cabot has been invited to give an important speech about how to achieve transformational change in the workplace. The speech will be given to attendees at the annual convention of the American Society of Association Executives and the Center for Association Leadership to be held in San Diego from August 16 t0 19.
Mr. Cabot was invited to give the speech because he is highly regarded as one of the foremost labor relations experts and strategists in North America.
He is the author of three best-selling books: Everybody Wins!, Up From Confrontation, and Stephen Cabot’s Complete Guide to Labor Relations. He has been profiled on the front page of The Wall Street Journal and interviewed numerous times on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, ABC World News, and various other media outlets.
For further information about this valuable and important speech, please visit http://www.asaeannualmeeting.org/home.cfm
Alternatively, Mr. Cabot may be contacted at sjcabot@cabotinstitute.com
In an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal of August 8, former Senator George McGovern, a man who has had a long career supporting organized labor, announced that he is against The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would do away with secret ballot elections to determine if workers can join unions. Organized labor and most Democrats support the EFCA, which would permit workers to sign cards indicating that they want to join unions. Of course, the cards would be presented by union organizers, who would pressure workers to add their signatures. No secret ballot elections would be necessary.
Senator McGovern wrote: “Under the EFCA, workers would lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder[s], from fear or reprisal….We cannot be a party [the Democrats] that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election….To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed….I think much of the of the congressional support is based on a desire to give our friends among union leaders what they want. But part of being a good steward of democracy means telling our friends ‘no’ when they press for a course that in the long run may… disrupt a tried an trusted method of conducting honest elections.”
It is remarkable and heartening to read Senator McGovern’s cogent argument against The Employee Free Choice Act, and one can only that his friends in the Democratic party not only heed his warning, but also have the courage to stand up to unreasonable and undemocratic union demands.