I like Joe Williams but quoting Mickey Kaus is a little too rich for anyone who’s been around the blogosphere for the last five years and seen Kaus’ contrarian neo-conservatism bite the dust over and over again. I’ll let Tula Connel do the rebuttal on card check organizing:
One of the most vitriolic of the anti-worker, anti-union propagandists is Richard Berman , whose long history of PR sleaze campaigns now includes the misleadingly named group, Union Facts, that acts as a front to do the dirty work for organizations like the Chamber. Berman’s past list of hatchet jobs includes a PR campaign to slam Mothers Against Drunk Driving on behalf of the alcohol industry and another literally toxic campaign for the tuna industry that Village Voice described as encouraging pregnant women to eat tuna—never mind the mercury.
Another claim by Berman and others—like neocon Mickey Kaus —who oppose workers’ freedom to form unions is that the NLRB process is “more fair” because union organizers “coerce” workers in the card-check process.
Not so, according to the vast majority of workers surveyed in a poll by the employee advocacy group American Rights at Work. Rutgers University and Wheeling Jesuit University professors Adrienne Eaton, Ph.D., and Jill Kriesky, Ph.D., respectively, conducted a national telephone survey of 430 randomly selected workers from worksites where employees sought to become represented by unions using NLRB elections or card-check campaigns in 2002.
Among the survey’s findings:
- Workers in NLRB elections were twice as likely (46 percent compared with 23 percent) as those in card-check campaigns to report that management coerced them to oppose the union.
- Fewer workers in card-check campaigns than in elections felt pressure from co-workers to support the union (17 percent compared with 22 percent).
American Rights at Work Executive Director Mary Beth Maxwell sums it up succinctly:
Looking at the survey results, one can only conclude that card-check opponents are trying to solve the wrong problem. If protecting workers’ free choice is really the goal, then you’ve got to start by ending management coercion.
Williams was a reporter for the Daily News before writing the NYCSA’s blog. Anyone who has put in any time as an organizer knows why it’s difficult to organize a union when management is willing to close down units, fire organizers, threaten workers, etc. You don’t have to go back to the 30’s to see the actions of a belligerent management trying to break unions; you just have to ask yourself what you were reading last week?
