If Barack Obama becomes the next president of the United States, the relationship between management and labor will significantly change to the disadvantage of Corporate America.
As we have been writing for quite some time, a Democratic president will mean the passage of The Employee Free Choice Act, which will eliminate secret ballot elections for workers. It will be replaced by card checks. Using card checks, organized labor will be able to coerce and intimidate workers into signing cards affirming that they want to join a union. When a majority of such cards have been signed, a company’s workforce will have been unionized without management having had an opportunity to present its case to workers.
Another ingredient of The Employee Free Choice Act is mandatory arbitration. Mr. Obama supports a provision that if collective bargaining does not result in a decision within 120 days, then the case goes to binding arbitration, the result of which will remain in force for two years. One can imagine unions taking more than 120 days to negotiate a contract just so that binding arbitration will do what they could not do during collective bargaining.
In addition, Mr. Obama supports the revocation of the NLRB’s Kentucky River decision. Unions also support its revocation, so that more and more people can be classified as workers and fewer can be classified as managers. The result will be a significantly increased number of potential union members.
Mr. Obama also supports legislation outlawing the use of replacement workers for those who go out on strike. If companies cannot hire replacement workers, they will be at the mercy of strikers, who can bring economic ruin to companies that don’t bend to union demands.
If Corporate America is to counter the anti-management policies of a President Obama, it must undertake a vigorous program to educate workers to the benefits of remaining union free. America is at a cross roads, and corporations must make sure that they undertake the proper course of action to maintian high levels of productivity and profitability.
As organized labor looks forward to Democratic majorities in both houses of congress and a Democratic president, it is preparing to pop champagne corks, for it knows that the Employee Free Choice Act (a.k.a. card checks) will be signed into law. Business owners, however, are justifiably upset about being aggressively targeted by unions. They have taken to referring to the Act as the Forced Choice Act, for workers will be intimidated and harassed into joining unions by aggressive union organizers. As the Hartford Courant reported: “the card-check procedure almost always results in a union victory because the union controls the entire process.”
When the National Labor Relations Act was signed into law 73-years ago, secret ballot elections were a principal component of the legislation. Both labor and management did not want to be intimidated by advocates for a single point of view. However, as union membership has fallen in recent years, unions have wanted to tilt the playing field so that more workers will join unions.
It doesn’t matter to union leaders that the Employee Free Choice Act is a decidedly undemocratic venture. Even the liberal former Senator George McGovern is in favor of secret ballot elections and against the Act. He rightly believes that doing away with secret ballot elections will destroy a valuable and essential feature of our democracy. He stated that it is wrong for politicians to “deny millions of employees the right to a private vote.” And more than 75 percent of Americans also think that secret ballots are the most democratic method of choosing a union.
It is obvious that the majority of Democratic politicians, however, are prepared to do the bidding of organized labor, especially since labor is spending more than $50-million to elect Democrats to the Senate, the House, and the Presidency.
The United States should look to Great Britain for what should be done. Britain passed the 1980 Employment Act that instituted secret ballot elections, after public voice-votes had led to acts of physical intimidation and harassment.
America is facing a dangerous challenge to one of its most respected traditions, and it is essential that Corporate America organize to defeat the Employee Free Choice Act. If not, we shall all have to live with the Forced Choice Act.
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While many people in various walks of life claim they have paid their dues, union members go on paying their dues for the entirety of their working lives. And, quite often, those union dues are used to pursue political agendas, which workers may not support.
As a result, there is a ballot initiative in Colorado known as Amendment 49, that would prohibit state and municipal governments from taking money from government workers’ paychecks and using that money for lobbying or electioneering.
The defeat of the Amendment has been vigorously supported by Democratic Governor Bill Ritter who is an ardent supporter of unions. And, of course, the unions are campaigning to defeat the Amendment as well.
Surprisingly, the majority of the state’s newspapers, including the liberal Denver Post, support Amendment 49.
Those who support the Amendment agree that no citizen should have income confiscated to pay for laws and regulations that they may not support. To force U. S. citizens to hand over hard-earned cash for purposes that they do not wish to support smacks of totalitarianism.
As the allure and value of unionization fades for millions of workers, unions are attempting to do whatever they can to increase their membership rolls; to that end, they are tapping their members’ salaries to help elect federal officials who will support The Employee Free Choice Act and its mechanism of card checks. Unions hope that such efforts will augment their power and wealth – regardless of the political and economic interests of their members.
As we have reported for a number of months, the Democrats are eager to pass the Employee Free Choice Act and have a new Democratic president sign it into law. We were, therefore, surprised to learn that a number of Democratic members of the House of Representatives have urged the Mexican government to utilize secret ballot elections in union organizing campaigns. Their reason for endorsing secret ballot elections is that such elections prevent the intimidation of workers.
And we agree with that.
Yet, those same Democratic representatives want to do away with secret ballot elections for U.S. workers, so that unions can organize ever larger numbers of workers. And the use of card checks will, no doubt, be accompanied by a certain amount of intimidation.
Why do congressional representatives prefer check cards in the U.S. and secret ballot elections in Mexico?
The reason is apparent: unions are spending millions of dollars to ensure that Democrats control both houses of congress as well as the White House. In other words, where there are unions, there are money and votes for the Democrats. And since there are no U.S. elections in Mexico, the House representatives have no interest in generating greater union membership south of the border.
So much for the principled consistency.
Last week, we reported that a union representing faculty members in colleges and universities in Pennsylvania had objected to a new state law that bans smoking on campuses throughout the state. It seemed odd, to the say the least, that a union would object to a law that protects students and faculty from the health hazards of tar of nicotine in their lungs.
Now another union has added its voice to an already ridiculous situation. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees has issued an echo of the earlier objection. It objects to the law because no collective bargaining preceded the enactment of the smoking ban.
Of course, the universities and colleges are rightly adhering to a state law, because the law in fact supersedes the union contract. Union leaders, however, perversely believe that there should have been collective bargaining before the state passed the smoking ban. In this case, of course, the law enacted by legislators is to the benefit of more than 100,000 students and 12,000 faculty members.
When unions object to a law that benefits its members simply because the law had bypassed collective bargaining indicates that unions would rather maintain their power than protect the health of individuals.