National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has a good op-ed up on "card check" legislation at the Los Angeles Times:

There is a bloody spin war over whether card check abolishes the secret ballot or not. Pro-card-check forces insist that it doesn’t. Unfortunately, these voices include many mainstream reporters who consistently use the language preferred by Big Labor. They note that if 30% of the workers sign a card asking for an election, they can have
one.

But this ignores the unions’ crimp tactics. For starters, the cards are written in ways that make "predatory lending" mortgages seem like paragons of full disclosure.

At the National Right to Work website, you can find an example of one of these cards. In big, bold letters on top, it says "Request for Employees Representation Election." But after you fill out all the relevant info, then there’s the small print, authorizing the Teamsters to "represent me in all negotiations of wages, hours and working conditions."

In other words, in many cases, workers who think they’re just voting for an election are in fact voting for unionization. The unions make it as difficult as possible to do the former without also doing the latter. Check a card, find the king’s shilling.

Also, if the number of cards is over 30% but below 50%, there still isn’t an election unless the organizers — not the workers — want it.

As Mickey Kaus, a one-man blogging crusader against card check, wrote, "No individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31% plurality or the 51% majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There’s no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to ‘choose’ a secret ballot."

Translation: They’re not workers with a vote, they’re marks.

Here’s a link to the "authorization card" Golberg references. Can you read the fine print? Better yet, would you have a chance to read it in the midst of an aggressive card check drive, when you’re surrounded after work by three union goons demanding signatures?