Secret Ballot Watch

Cesar Chavez is an icon of the American labor movement for successfully organizing farm workers in the 1960s and 1970s.

But how did he become so successful? One of the reasons may have been his insistence on the right to form unions by secret ballot – a right many workers would be denied under the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, a bill better known as card check.

When California lawmakers introduced a similar state law in 2007, some from the United Farm Workers, the union Chavez founded, were bewildered:  

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“In the 1970s, United Farm Workers founder Cesar E. Chavez fought in dusty fields and the halls of government to give agricultural laborers the right to cast secret ballots to form unions at California's farms, ranches and vineyards.

“Now, those who came after Chavez want to change the rules, and that has farmers and business groups up in arms.

“A bill on the governor's desk would let the UFW represent workers and bargain for contracts -- without having won the backing of a majority of workers in a government-supervised vote. …

“But some of the UFW's earliest backers say they are puzzled by the union's reversal of its long-standing support for the secret ballot.

“Don Villarejo, the former director of the California Institute for Rural Studies in Davis and a UFW volunteer activist in the mid-1970s, recalled that the union fought hard to include the secret ballot in the state law that guaranteed the rights of farm laborers. He said the UFW alleged that the rival Teamsters union had intimidated people by competing with the UFW and winning a series of sweetheart contracts that helped employers keep the UFW at bay.

“‘The UFW contended that the secret ballot was the only way people could be protected from intimidation by outsiders,’ Villarejo said. ‘You have to scratch your head and say, 'What's going on?'”

Marc Lifsher, “UFW seeks new way to organize,” Los Angeles Times, 09.14.07 

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What’s going on is that special interests are demanding political payback, and card check is how they want it delivered. Never mind that public voting subjects workers to intimidation and strife in the workplace by removing a right that many union members – as well as leaders like Chavez – fought hard to create and protect.

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