Secret Ballot Watch

Don’t even think about installing card check in California. Or for that matter, just about anywhere else.

States from coast to coast have been actively working to thwart the Employee Free Choice Act or state versions of the bill that’s now sitting in Congress.   

One of the more recent blows happened in the Golden State. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed – for the fourth time – a card check proposal for unionizing farm workers that was very similar to EFCA. Here’s what the San Francisco Chronicle had to say about the latest termination of this undemocratic process by “The Govern-ator”:  

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“Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed a union-backed bill that would have required farmers to negotiate with a labor union if a majority of their employees signed membership agreements.

“It marks the fourth time the governor has rejected requiring farm owners to abide by what are known as card-check provisions. The bill he vetoed Wednesday, SB789 by State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, was similar to federal legislation for nonfarm employees that is the subject of an intense battle between business and labor forces in Congress. …

“Business groups counter that card check would allow unions to pressure employees in private and would effectively eliminate union elections, even though workers would retain the right to demand an election.

“‘If there's an option, the union will take the route that's easiest, the signing of those cards, and that takes away the secret-ballot election,’ said Doug Mosebar, a Santa Barbara County rancher and president of the California Farm Bureau Federation. ‘It's at the heart of the democratic process.’

“Schwarzenegger expressed a similar viewpoint in his veto message Wednesday.

“‘This process fundamentally alters an employee's right to a secret-ballot election that allows the employee to choose, in the privacy of the voting booth, whether or not to be represented,’ the governor said.”

^{Egelko, “Governor vetoes card check for farm workers,” San Francisco Chronicle, 9.04.09}  

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Other states have been working to protect the secret ballot, too. In Arizona, voters will have a chance to decide the issue in a 2010 referendum by, ironically, voting by secret ballot. Meanwhile, South Dakota lawmakers are offering a proposal that would allow voters to do the same in the Mount Rushmore State.

But opposition to EFCA is more than just protecting the secret ballot. There’s the act’s forced government contracts provision, for example. In Michigan, they already have a similar law on the books – and the results have been so terrible that even one of the law’s original supporters has backed away from it.

Newspaper editorial boards have joined the fight against EFCA, too. In Virginia, Lynchburg’s News & Advance tried to pin down key Democrats in Congress about where they stand on workers’ right to a secret ballot: “Do you support the right of an American worker to decide, in secret and in private, whether he wants to be represented by a labor union on the job?,” the newspaper asked. “Yes or no? And no dodging the question.” 

In Florida, the Sun-Sentinel echoed widespread concerns about how card check would impact workers, noting that the practice “would open the door for a lot of coercion and intimidation, in the workplace, in homes. Theoretically, a union could gain certification without every employee, or management, knowing about it.”

The United States is a huge country, with more than 300 million people living in it. Yet somehow, citizens in states from north to south and east to west agree on one thing: The Employee Free Choice Act is no good and should not become law.

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