Rep. Howard McKeon
2007-03-01 08:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

So fundamental and so sacred is the right for every American to organize in his or her workplace that we have guaranteed and protected it through the same process we elect our commander in chief and the 535 men and women who hold the power of the federal purse.

It’s the same process we celebrate each November. The same process we have become so accustomed to, some of us can’t help but take it for granted. Taken for granted, that is, until that right is taken away — and today in the U.S. House of Representatives Democrats will take a major step in their drive to do just that.

At issue is the cleverly titled Employee Free Choice Act, legislation backed almost universally by House Democrats who have been prodded along so forcefully by organized labor interests who helped spur them into the majority that this truly unprecedented bill has landed on the House floor less than two months into the new Congress and after all of one hearing.

Under current law, employees may organize in a workplace in one of two ways. First, they can petition for a secret ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

In the alternative, they may seek union recognition by submitting 50 percent plus one authorization cards, indicating their support for union representation. This is done after the employer and union seeking representation sign a “neutrality agreement” permitting the union to organize through this type of “card check” campaign.

The Employee Free Choice Act would kill the first of the two options — turning its back on more than seven decades of secret-ballot organizing elections, not to mention countless court cases reaffirming the private ballot as the single best way to protect workers from intimidation and coercion in union-organizing campaigns.

Why? Well, since unions win elections only half the time when secret ballots are used and nearly 80 percent of the time when card check campaigns are conducted, it’s not hard to figure out.

And given organized labor’s decline — it now represents 12 percent of the nation’s workforce and only 7 percent of private sector workers — it’s not difficult to perceive this as its last, best chance at retaining members, not to mention their membership dues.

What card check supporters never have had an answer for, however, is this: How exactly does this much-romanticized (by Big Labor and their allies in Congress) process benefit the worker and protect — as the legislation’s title implies — his or her “free choice?” The card check, by its very nature, makes a worker’s vote completely and utterly public.

There’s no way around it. Once that card is signed, everyone knows his or her vote — the employer, union organizers, co-workers and the union bosses coordinating the whole process.

To think that — at the very least — this doesn’t apply substantial pressure to the employee and — in the worst case — this process wouldn’t leave a worker entirely vulnerable to heavy-handed intimidation and coercion is either naive or misleading, depending on who’s making the argument. A secret ballot, by its very nature, protects workers from all of that.

Later today, I will manage the opposition to this legislation on the House floor. When we debate it on the floor, I will tell my colleagues this: We are standing on this floor, considering this bill, and ultimately, casting our votes at the end of this debate because of the power of the secret ballot.

Last November, we asked the American people to be there for us, by casting these ballots and sending us to Congress. Less than four months later, when workers are looking to us to protect their rights to continue casting secret ballots in the workplace, will we be there for them?

Rep. Howard McKeon, R-Calif., is the ranking minority member of the House Education and Labor Committee.