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?

Now we know why union bosses don’t believe in the secret ballot: they don’t really know what a secret ballot looks like.

Film crew union IATSE recently conducted a vote of its members to ratify its contract proposal with Hollywood producers. The union bosses sent each member a large packet containing the proposal, a ballot, and two reply envelopes.

After marking the ballot, members were instructed to put the ballot in a white envelope (which does not include any identifying information), and then put the white envelope in a blue envelope (which does include identifying information).

The problem? The white envelopes were see-through, meaning union bosses could automatically throw out votes opposing the union boss line. Worse, because the outer envelope contains the voter’s name, union goons would also know which members voted which way.

No wonder union bosses complain the secret ballot doesn’t work.

After a long and vicious feud, it seems CNA and SEIU bosses have finally buried the hatchet… in the backs of independent nurses:

Two of the nation’s fastest-growing labor unions — the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association — ended a bitter yearlong dispute on Wednesday by agreeing to work together to unionize hospital workers and push for universal health coverage.

For the last year, the two unions have viciously denounced each other, with the service employees accusing the nurses of sabotaging efforts to organize 8,300 hospital workers in Ohio, and the nurses’ union accusing S.E.I.U. officials of stalking and harassing its leaders.

“We have buried the hatchet,” said Rose Ann DeMoro, president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

So the SEIU and CNA bosses have tabled their ugly little internecine war to focus on what’s REALLY important to them — corralling more nurses into forced-dues-paying ranks!

Given the circumstances, we’re not too suprised by this touching reconciliation. The heart of the CNA-SEIU feud — CNA criticisms of coercive SEIU organizing tactics — was pretty much a dead letter after CNA operatives were implicated in the exact same practices at Houston and Philadelphia-area hospitals. For those of you who missed it, here’s the Foundation’s video report on coercive CNA organizing abuses in Texas:

Here at Freedom@Work, we spend a lot of time documenting union bosses’ shameless hypocrisy, but this latest incident (almost) surprised even us. The powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) recently fired 75 staffers. But why is an organization that collects hundreds of millions of dollars in easy money (forced dues) per year cutting jobs now, in the midst of a devastating economic recession? Simple – they want even more cash for political lobbying:

"It’s completely hypocritical," said staff union President Malcolm Harris…

Harris said his union’s understanding is that the layoffs are the result of budget troubles faced by SEIU, which, on top of the California dispute, spent $80 million during the 2008 election and is planning to spend tens of millions more to advocate on behalf of Obama’s health-care plan and card check.

The entire sordid episode is sadly reminiscent of the SEIU’s election-year shenanigans, when the union hierarchy threw in the towel on the notion of hands-on employee assistance, replacing a help line with a remote call center — the goal being to free up even more resources for political campaigning.

And now, yet again, SEIU bosses are demonstrating that they are more concerned with politics and forced-dues dollars than looking out the working man. 

(Via National Review)

Last week, Big Labor’s bought-and-paid-for politicians in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate introduced the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill. This Big Labor-endorsed compulsory unionism scheme is intended to give federal government bureaucrats the unprecedented power to impose wages and working conditions, including forced union dues, on employees and employers after workers are herded into union collectives without even a secret ballot election.

Neal Catlett, former union president at a Whirlpool plant in Arkansas, spoke out against Big Labor’s card check coercion:

Catlett, now retired from Whirlpool, opposes card check. He told The City Wire that he has seen plenty of “nonsense” among Whirlpool leaders and union leaders to know that anything other than a secret ballot will lead to intimidation, coercion and corruption on all sides.

“I strongly support secret ballots. Period. It doesn’t matter at what level, whether it is voting for a union or the president or your congressman,” Catlett said. “Your ideas should be personal as to if you want a union or don’t want a union.”

Card check is a dangerous encroachment on workers’ rights in the workplace and opens up the door for a flood of union intimidation and coercion to force more workers into forced-union-dues-paying ranks. Carlett, discrediting any claim that the legislation protects workers based on his own personal experience as a union president, hit the nail on the head when he stated:

“Doing away with the secret ballot is not good for the unions. It’s not good for any business… Open voting creates an atmosphere of intimidation. It creates an atmosphere where people will use your opinion against you. I’ve seen the threats and I’ve actually seen the physical conflict, if you know what I mean, come from the business side and from the union side,” Catlett said. “I just don’t see how any process that is not private will protect the worker.”

Frankly, we suggest Cartlett hire a bodyguard immediately.  We’re not kidding.  Union retribution can be swift and ugly.

In the latest Foundation podcast, Legal Information Director Patrick Semmens sits down with Greg Mourad, Director of Legislation for the National Right to Work Committee, to discuss the recently reintroduced card check bill’s legislative prospects as well as its implications for employee freedom. Click here to listen or use the embeddable player below the fold: