Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, writes in the American Spectator about Big Labor’s Card Check Forced Unionism Bill. In his article Bandow cites the story of Mike Ivey, who was represented by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys after UAW organizers targeted his plant for an aggressive card check campaign complete with plenty of union intimidation, pressure and harassment.

The secret ballot is key. It protects workers from retaliation — that’s why the U.S. elects public officials, rather than allowing citizens to sign election cards. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell which worker is more vulnerable to pressure and even violence: one who gets to cast a secret ballot or one who must sign or not sign a card in public view. Four decades ago a federal appeals court declared: "it is beyond dispute that secret election is a more accurate reflection of the employees’ true desires than a check of authorization cards collected at the behest of a union organizer."

Former union organizer Jen Jason testified before the House Education and Labor Committee: "During the course of my employment with the union, I began to understand the reality behind the rhetoric. I took in the ways that organizers were manipulating workers just to get a majority on ‘the cards’ and the various strategies that they employed. I began to appreciate that promises made by organizers at the worker’s house had little to do with how the union actually functions as a ‘service’ organization."

In fact, misrepresentation and intimidation are routine, as union organizers lie about what signing the care means (claiming, for example, that it certifies attending a meeting or requesting more information) and badger employees to sign (sending groups of pro-union workers to people’s homes). The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has collected the stories of many employees, such as that of Mike Ivey, a South Carolina materials handler, who complained that the UAW "created a hostile work environment" through relentless pressure to sign cards. These abuses would be multiplied if card check automatically yielded recognition, foreclosing the need for a vote.

This may be why even union members favor elections. Polls have found that eight to nine of every ten of them favor a vote. Card check is a tool for union executives and Democratic politicians, not workers.

For more on Mike Ivey’s story watch this video where he talks about his experience with card check:

Today’s sham hearings for the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill looked more like a union brass press conference as civility was repeatedly thrown aside as scores of rowdy union partisans applauded every time a Senator toed the union boss line (and snickered when anyone dared to dissent from that line).

Testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions was virtually monopolized by union partisans. But Larry Getts, a Dana Coproration employee in Fort Wayne, Indiana, offered a first-hand account of the kind of pressure and intimidation by union goons:

In fact, one day, an official approached me again claiming fifty percent of the plant had signed — so now I was going to have to sign the card to “get my information in the system.”

I signed the card then because I thought I had to.

I didn’t learn until later that even then, I should not have been forced to sign the card.

Read Getts’ full testimony here (PDF).

The posh Miami Fontainebleu Hotel will play host to Vice President Biden, Hilda Solis, and the AFL-CIO executive council this week, as union bosses work tirelessly to spend employees’ hard-earned forced dues on $1000 per night rooms and critical projects like sampling each of the facility’s eleven restaurants, thoroughly testing the resort’s 40,000 square foot spa, and enjoying the sights and sounds of Miami Beach:

The conference will also cover union bosses’ novel approach to economic recovery, which involves forcing more unwilling workers into union collectives through the grossly misnamed "Employee Free Choice Act." But we’re not quite sure how extracting millions of dollars in additional forced union dues is supposed to revive our flagging economy — perhaps the AFL-CIO plans to single-handedly save the luxury resort business by scheduling more conferences?

Of course, history tells us handing more forced unionism power over to union bosses will only make the current economic downturn even worse.

For those of you who missed it, the National Right to Work Foundation recently released a video featuring Foundation President Mark Mix urging all Right to Work supporters to get involved in our efforts to stop the Obama Administration from rolling back basic union disclosure regulations. Now Mix’s message is available in podcast form. Click here to listen:

Here on Freedom@Work, we have told you about President Obama’s deeply disturbing executive orders aimed at blacklisting the 92.5 percent of America’s private-sector workers who have chosen not to unionize.

One of the orders effectively bars federal contractors from sharing truthful, non-coercive information with their employees about the downsides of unionization.

For an example of what this kind of information is like, look no further than what union management says when employees of a union wish to unionize.

In the letter linked below, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union president J.J. Barry warns against "chang[ing] the system…solely because of an effort stemming from the isolated complaints of a few [union employees]." Moreover,

The selection of a bargaining representative is likely to change the nature of the employer/employee relationship, by making it more formal and structured, and diminishing the present system of direct resolution of issues between Represenatives and their Vice Presidents, Department Directors, etc.

But union bosses cry foul when other employers express similar opinions, and now their powerful pro-forced unionism allies in government want to ban such speech by federal contractors so the contractors’ employees are denied the right to make a fully informed choice.

Click here to read the full letter (PDF).

In 1959, well-meaning advocates of employee freedom secured passage of the Labor-Management Reporting Disclosure Act (LMRDA), a bill that promised disclosure of union finances with the (mostly unrealized) promise of weeding out corrupt union racketeers.

In 2009, President Barack Obama pledged his Administration would be on the side of disclosure — but that has been revealed as a false promise.

The Obama Administration has moved to eliminate some modest union disclosure regulations that would allow American workers forced to pay union dues some basic information about the self-awarded “benefits” union bosses enjoy.

Of course, so long as forced unionism privileges remain intact, no amount of disclosure will meaningfully increase union accountability, but perhaps employees will gain a greater awareness of how their forced dues are spent.

Please watch the video below and then go to the Department of Labor’s website to comment on these detrimental regulatory changes. All comments related to this issue must be made by March 5.

You can view the Foundation’s request for extension link or make your own comment regarding the effective date change. (Just click on the yellow comment icon in either of the above links to add your own comments about this cover-up of union boss corruption.)

Note: You should have Docket: LMSO-2008-0002 listed at the top of your comment. Please let them know how you feel about this power grab. Feel free to e-mail us a copy of your comment.

You may also visit Regulations.gov and enter LMSO-2008-0002 to comment, search comments, or read your own comment after it’s been published.

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The National Right to Work Foundation provides free legal aid to employees so they can fight back against union coercion and abuse.

The Foundation must rely on the voluntary support of individual Americans who believe in our cause and wish to advance our strategic litigation program. To make a fully tax-deductible donation in whatever amount, please click here.

The Future of Freedom Foundation’s "Freedom Daily" published an article titled "The Authoritarianism of American Labor Law" by George C. Leef, author of Free Choice for Workers: A History of the Right to Work Movement.

In it, Leef points out federal labor law, including the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), heavily favors union officials at the expense of workplace freedom and the individual rights of employees. Leef continues by pointing out the dangers to liberty the "Card Check" Forced Organizing schemes pose to workers’ rights:

The secret-ballot elections under the NLRA at least have the virtue of shielding individual workers from reprisals for going “the wrong way.” Union officials have found what they regard as a better method of determining whether a majority want their services. It’s called the “card check” system. If a majority of workers sign a card saying that they want a union to represent them, then that should suffice for the NLRB to declare the union to be the exclusive bargaining representative, without resort to an election. Naturally, it’s easier for union organizers to get signatures on cards — using tactics that can include misrepresentation and harassment — than to get workers to vote for them in an election after the airing of arguments for and against the union.

Under the NLRA, however, employers have the right to insist on a secret-ballot election no matter how many cards might be signed. The Employee Free Choice Act would take that away and require the NLRB to certify unions simply on the basis of signed cards.

Furthermore, the [so-called Employee Free Choice Act] EFCA would ratchet up the coercion regarding contract negotiations. The current law is bad enough in compelling “good faith” bargaining, but the proposed new law would allow government officials to arbitrate the terms of the initial union contract. That is to say, if management and the union can’t arrive at a mutually agreeable labor contract, the federal government will impose one. That additional dollop of federal coercion is said by supporters to be necessary to effectuate the workers’ “right to bargain.” In a free society, though, there is no “right to bargain” with people who don’t want to bargain with you, and a fortiori there is no right to have the government dictate the terms of that “bargaining.”

Union officials were licking their chops at the prospect of using the EFCA to dragoon thousands of new workers into their ranks, but the bill has died in Congress. It will be resurrected in the future and we will again hear supporters making claims of why we need its new coercive features. We will also hear opponents arguing that we should stick with the good old status quo. What I think we really need is a discussion about the proper approach to labor law in a free society.

To read the rest of the article and Leef’s proposal for ending the compulsion currently entrenched in American labor law, click here.

Perhaps due to their plethora of special privileges under the law, union bosses frequently act and speak as if they were the actual government. Take AFSCME Maryland union boss Patrick Moran, who insultingly blustered to the Baltimore Sun,

This is about democracy, bottom line. If you don’t like democracy, then I guess you don’t like the country we live in.

You see, Moran’s government union — with the support of union-label politicians like Governor Martin O’Malley — wants the power to force nonmembers to pay for "services" they didn’t ask for and don’t want.

"At some point we can’t be a charity," said Sue Esty, assistant director for AFSCME Maryland.

Union bosses want the special privilege effectively to tax independent employees as a condition of employment.

Of course, union chiefs refuse to accept the easiest, most fair solution. Rather than lobbying for a new law forcing nonmember employees to pay so-called "fees" to an unwanted union, union bosses could work to repeal any sections of the law which supposedly require them to "represent" nonmembers.

The reason union officials will never accept this solution is simple: they just want the money.

The fees could more than double the union’s annual income. Currently, the union collects about $3.8 million in dues from about 10,000 members a year.

With so much focus on the economic crisis, it’s worth revisiting a Wall Street Journal article penned recently by National Right to Work Committee and Foundation President Mark Mix. The article explains how a massive expansion in forced unionism power played a key role in making the Great Depression longer and deeper:

By the mid-1930s, the U.S. economy appeared to be climbing out of the Great Depression. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), which had bottomed out at 41 in 1932, was advancing. It increased 73% from the beginning of 1935 through the end of 1936, when it hit 180. The number of unemployed, 13 million in 1933, dropped to 9.5 million in 1935 and 7.6 million in 1936.

Then, in 1937, the DJIA plunged 33% in what is often called "a depression within a depression." Joblessness skyrocketed.

A principal factor in the meltdown that year was the U.S. Supreme Court’s surprise 5-4 decision in early April to uphold the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, which had passed two years earlier. This measure, which is still the basis of our labor relations regime, authorized union officials to seek and obtain the power to act as the "exclusive" (that is, the monopoly) bargaining agent over all the front-line employees, including union nonmembers as well as members, in a unionized workplace.

As Amity Shlaes observed in her recent history of the Great Depression, "The Forgotten Man," within a few months after the Wagner Act was upheld, industrial production began to plummet and "the jobs started to disappear, with unemployment moving back to 1931 levels," even as the number of workers under union control was "growing astoundingly."

Given the reality of unions in the workplace, the law meant that efficiency and profitability were compromised, by forcing employers to equally reward their most productive and least productive employees. Therefore subsequent wage increases for some workers led to widespread job losses.

Pre-Depression-era growth and prosperity did not return to the private sector until the early 1950s, when the spread of state right-to-work laws prohibiting forced union membership and dues greatly reduced the detrimental effects of the Wagner Act.

The U.S. has just experienced another stock market crash, and Barack Obama, the candidate now favored to be the next president, is in favor of what amounts to a new Wagner Act.

If the mislabeled "Employee Free Choice Act," becomes law, it will likely have a similar effect on the economy as the original Wagner Act, transforming what could have been a recovery into a lengthy, deep recession, or worse.

(Read the entire article)

Last year, Freedom@Work reported on the allegations of corruption against Tyrone Freeman, former boss of the largest Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate in California. Freeman spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars of rank-and-file workers’ forced union dues on his wife’s and mother’s companies and on a luxurious fat-cat lifestyle. The Los Angeles Times later reported Freeman’s SEIU affiliate "charity" failed to spend a single cent on its charitable mission in two of the four years it has been in existence.

Today, the Los Angeles Times reports another SEIU union official corruption scandal, this time executive vice president of the SEIU’s Illinois-Indiana health care affiliate and national SEIU union board member Byron Hobbs.

Hobbs is accused of billing the union for $9,000 for personal expenses. The LA Times continues its report by putting the latest scandal in context:

…[former Freeman Chief-of-Staff] Rickman Jackson, was removed as head of the SEIU’s largest Michigan local, because he allegedly received improper lease payments for his Bell Gardens house.

Annelle Grajeda, president of both a second L.A. local and the SEIU’s state council, has been on leave since August, when the union began investigating whether she had improperly used her influence to keep her ex-boyfriend on the county payroll…

Last month, the union imposed a trusteeship on an Oakland-based local and fired its officers, accusing them of misusing dues money to wage a political battle against SEIU President Andy Stern.

And of course, who can forget that it was a SEIU union boss who was engaged in pay-to-play talks with former [and corrupt] Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich — to allegedly buy Obama’s then-vacant U.S. Senate seat.

Unfortunately, the people most hurt by union boss corruption are the rank-and-file workers, especially in forced unionism states. Right to work laws allow workers to hold union officials more accountable because workers can cut off union dues if they don’t like union officials’ so-called “representation,” politics, corruption, or fat-cat lifestyles.