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Secret Ballot Watch

Card Check’s Secret Ballot Hypocrisy

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 7, 2009 | Alexa Marrero ((202) 225-4527)
Advocates of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act do support a secret ballot – but there’s a catch.

Under federal law, secret ballots are used to dissolve a union. But when workers want to create a union, that’s different.

Secret ballots, which have been used to form unions for generations, are put aside. Instead, under EFCA, the “card check” method is used, leaving workers open to intimidation and public pressure – and possibly having their workplace taken over by government bureaucrats.

Card-check backers want to do this by re-writing part of the National Labor Relations Act. Here’s the section of the Employee Free Choice Act that would do away with the secret ballot:  

"If the [National Labor Relations] Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).”

H.R. 1409, “Employee Free Choice Act of 2009,” introduced 03.10.09, emphasis added 

So the question is: If card check is good enough to form a union, then why can’t it be used to end one?

Card check supporters remain mum on the obvious hypocrisy. But if past is prologue, you can bet they won’t be treating all secret ballots equally any time soon: In 2007, the last time the act was under consideration, Republicans on the House Education and Labor Committee offered an amendment that would allow a card check campaign to decertify a union as well as create one.

Democrats rejected that – and several other GOP amendments that would make the card-check practice, well, more democratic. Then, as now, card check supporters are awfully selective in their support for the secret ballot.

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