Secret Ballot Watch

The U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly jobs report was released this morning, and the news wasn’t good. An additional 467,000 Americans lost their jobs in the month of June, and the unemployment rate ticked upward to 9.5 percent. 

Policymakers in Washington should be focused on policies that will enable job creation and promote economic recovery. At a minimum, it seems obvious that lawmakers should avoid enacting any proposal that would exacerbate our current economic woes by eliminating more jobs and driving the unemployment rate even higher.

In this context, it’s useful to look back on a report issued earlier this year that attempted to quantify the employment consequences if the anti-worker card check plan were ever to become law. An abstract of the report, “An Empirical Assessment of the Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications,” explains—

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“The precise effect on unemployment will depend on the degree to which EFCA increases union density, but for every 3 percentage points gained in union membership through card checks and mandatory arbitration, the following year's unemployment rate is predicted to increase by 1 percentage point and job creation is predicted to fall by around 1.5 million jobs. Thus, if EFCA passed today and resulted in an increase in unionization from the current rate of about 12% to 15%, then unionized workers would increase from 15.5 to 19.6 million while unemployment a year from now would rise by 1.5 million, to 10.4 million. If EFCA were to increase the percentage of private sector union membership by between 5 and 10 percentage points, as some have suggested, my analysis indicates that unemployment would increase by 2.3 to 5.4 million in the following year and the unemployment rate would increase by 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points in the following year.” 

Layne-Farrar, “An Empirical Assessment of the Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications,” March 2009 

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In the face of today’s jobs report, it seems clearer than ever that Congress cannot – it must not – embrace an economic policy that will destroy more jobs and drive the unemployment rate up even further. Whether it’s the card check component of the bill (forcing union recognition without secret ballots) or the forced government contracts (putting federal bureaucrats in charge of wages, benefits, and work rules), one thing is clear: Card check would take an already bad situation for millions of American workers and families and make it far worse.

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