Card Check is Gone. So What's Next?

Card Check is gone. Of course, EFCA never removed the uber American and democratic secret ballot. Now the question centers on what will replace card check and voting for unions. I think there's a place for the secret ballot. However, through a skillful propaganda and scare campaign, conservatives and business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and a bevy of other anti-union organizations turned the secret ballot into something inviolable and under attack by insidious, freedom-stealing unions and their Democratic allies.

The truth is that companies routinely call on un-democratic methods to crush unions and organizing drives. Pro-union employees are fired, wages or hours are restructured, employees are forced to attend anti-union seminars at work, and a host of implicit and explicit threats are levied in the workplace. What did unions get? Organizers could not enter the work place, unions waited for two months (sometimes longer) until an election, and they were lucky if their representatives in a work place didn't face harassment or firing. Card check was created to remedy the harsh disparity in favor of management.

As Nathan Newman of TPM and others argue, Democrats should refashion the bill into one based on speedy elections and "cracking down on illegal corporate behavior during union elections." SEIU, AFL-CIO, and Democrats could launch a fusillade on how companies devise and initiate a host of unfair tactics and strip employees of their rights. If "democracy" doomed card check, it should be flipped on its head to reverse the attack as a cudgel against NAM, Chamber of Commerce, Wal Mart, Starbucks, etc. What solutions exist in the wake of card check? Strict standards for elections that occur within a few days, protections for pro-union workers from firing or disciplining, presence in the work place in the midst of an organizing drive, and the ability to share its message with workers in an equal footing with company seminars that attack unions.

It's not uncommon for people to contend that unions were useful when the US industrialized, but they have no place with our modern economy. The fact remains that unions are crushed or impeded by employers' tactics that ramped up in the 80s, and were met by an antagonistic or indifferent Department of Labor that had little interest in disputing the status quo after unions faced government and business assaults from the 1970s until today. Further, that line of argument hinders any discussion of what comprises today's working-class and opens the door for the continued blurring of the poor and working-class into an amorphous body that doesn't warrant representation in government, the work place, and domestic and foreign policy decisions.