I’ll Worry About Widespread Union Violence When You Show Me The Police Reports

The House passed the Employee Free Choice Act last week, which if signed into law will allow workers to organize when over 50% of a workforce signs cards indicating that they support the formation of a union (“card check”), without the subsequent NLRB sponsored secret ballot election that employers are now entitled to demand.

Like pretty much everyone else who generally supports the labor movement, I think this is a wonderful idea (I doubt it’ll make it through the Senate, and if it does it’ll be vetoed, but it’s the right thing to do.) NLRB elections are a long drawn out process that provide scope for employers to intimidate workers and illegally fire organizers — under these circumstances organizing becomes next thing to impossible. The card check process, on the other hand, is simple, fast, and much less easily manipulated — it gives unions a fair shot. If anything’s going to reverse the decline in private-sector union membership, card check organization is it.

The reaction from those who are less enthusiastically pro-labor, on the other hand, has been between dubious and hostile. The problem they see with card check organization is the danger that workers will be intimidated into signing cards for fear of violent retaliation from organizers if they refuse. One response to this is that in the US today, intimidation by management is a significant problem, and intimidation by unions really isn’t, as demonstrated by a study that’s been going around showing that there’s less intimidation fom union organizers than from management under any circumstances, and less intimidation from either union organizers or management in card check elections than in NLRB secret ballot elections. The response has been (and it’s a fair one) that it’s one smallish study, and by itself doesn’t say much.

A better response, I think, to concerns that workers will be violently intimidated by organizers to sign up with a union is that card check is the law right now. Any organizing campaign now has to go through the card check stage before the workers are entitled to a secret ballot election, and failure at that stage is fatal to the campaign. So organizers now have the same motive and opportunity for violent intimidation that they would under the EFCA scheme — the signed cards are a sine qua non for a successful organizing campaign, and the organizers know exactly who has signed. Any violent intimidation to be expected under the new regime should already be happening now, at pretty much the same level of intensity you’d expect under the new regime — secret ballot elections would have fewer successful unions, but they wouldn’t be likely to involve less union-sponsored violence.

Now, I’m not going to commit myself to the position that there has never been violent intimidation of workers by union organizers, but I will say that I haven’t seen reporting on it in the couple of decades I’ve been following labor news. Whatever union sponsored violence in organizing campaigns goes on now, it appears to be infrequent enough that law enforcement is completely on top of it; given that the EFCA should reduce management intimidation without having any significant reason to increase union intimidation, then, I’d consider it an unmixed good. (Also at Unfogged.)