The recent Chamber v. Brown decision (.pdf) highlighted one of the worst aspects of coercive union organizing. Writing for the majority, Justice Stevens emphasized the California statute’s most problematic feature: while the free flow of truthful information about the downsides of unionization was shut off by the state’s draconian regulations, union organizers received special dispensation to harass workers both at home and on the job:

Instead of forbidding the use of state funds for all employer advocacy regarding unionization, AB 1889 [the California law] permits use of state funds for select employer advocacy activities that promote unions. Specifically, the statute exempts expenses incurred in connection with, inter alia, giving unions access to the workplace, and voluntarily recognizing unions without a secret ballot election.

"Voluntarily recognizing unions without a secret ballot election" is a euphemism for coercive card-check drives. And while the Chamber v. Brown decision is a small brake on in-your-face union organizing drives underway across America, the frequency of card-check drives has increased markedly over the past several years.  Evidently, union organizers have realized that publicly badgering employees into signing away their rights to self-representation is a lot easier than acceding to federally-supervised secret ballot elections.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Foundation staff attorneys recently acquired data from the National Labor Relations Board on the incidence of card-check petitions in the workplace.  According to this NLRB spreadsheet, union agents gained monopoly bargaining privileges using these methods in more than 250 America workplaces since November of 2007. The biggest offenders were members of SEIU President Andy Stern’s so-called "Change to Win" coalition: the SEIU and UNITE HERE racked up 26 successful card-check drives each, while the Teamsters managed to pull off an impressive 108 card-check drives.  TheNLRB was not required to record this information until the Foundation’s Dana/Metaldyne victory last September.

So why is coercive card-check organizing so uniquely damaging to employee freedom? The reason is simple: forcing workers to publicly disclose their preferences to union organizers leaves them vulnerable to intimidation, harassment, and retaliation.

Here’s an excerpt from the congressional testimony of Jen Jason, a former UNITE HERE union organizer who participated in several card-check petition drives:

From my experience, the number of cards signed appear to have little relationship to the ultimate vote count. During a private election campaign, even though a union still sends organizers out to workers’ homes on frequent canvassing in attempts to gain support, the worker has a better chance to get perspective on the questions at hand. The time allocated for the election to go forward allows the worker a chance to think through his or her own issues without undue influence—thus avoiding an immediate, impulsive decision based on little or no fact. After all, the decision to join a union is often life-changing, and workers should be afforded the time to debate, discuss and research all of the options available to them.

As an organizer working under a “card check” system versus an election system, I knew that “card check” gave me the ability to quickly agitate a set of workers into signing cards. I did not have to prove the union’s case, answer more informed questions from workers or be held accountable for the service record of my union.

When the union is allowed to implement the “card check” strategy, the decision about whether or not an individual employee would choose to join a union is reduced to a crisis decision. This situation is created by the organizer and places the worker into a high pressure sales situation. Furthermore, my experience is that in jurisdictions in which “card check” was actually legislated, organizers tended to be even more willing to harass, lie and use fear tactics to intimidate workers into signing cards. I have personally heard from workers that they signed the union card simply to get the organizer to leave their home and not harass them further. At no point during a “card check” campaign, is the opportunity created or fostered for employees to seriously consider their working lives and to think about possible solutions to any problems.

Pretty sobering stuff.  Of course, the card-check strategy was never intended to fairly gauge workers’ preferences.

After working with UNITE HERE organizers for years, Jen Jason finally got the full picture. Her experience should make the pernicious nature of card-check organizing abundantly clear:

I began my career with UNITE with a strong belief in worker’s rights and democracy in the workplace. 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 a worker’s house had little to do with how the union actually functions as a “service” organization.