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Union votes should remain secret ballot

By Doug Alexander

When is a secret ballot not the most democratic process for allowing people to vote on an important issue? According to a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, it’s when you don't like the results.

Kentucky workers already can be denied the right to decide for themselves whether they want to join and pay dues to a union once a collective-bargaining agreement is in place. Kentucky workers already work in an environment where they can lose their jobs for refusing to join a union.

Now, Kentucky workers are at risk of losing the right to the privacy of their own convictions. At the request of union leaders, who direct more money into political campaigns than any other interest group in the nation, the House has passed the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act.

Simply put, the measure does away with secret-ballot elections among workers when deciding on union representation and replaces them with an authorization-card process in which everyone, particularly the union organizers, knows which employees want a union and which don’t.

“Kentucky workers are at risk of losing the right to the privacy of their own convictions.”    

What is wrong with the secret ballot, which the vast majority of people consider a fundamental principle of the democratic process? It’s not getting unions the results they want.

Union membership has been in decline for decades, dropping to about 12 percent of total population nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One reason for the decline is that workers are rejecting union representation in about half of the elections held. So rather than make union membership more relevant to today's worker, union leaders want to change the rules.

In the very first line of an op-ed published recently by The Washington Post and reprinted in several Kentucky newspapers, Lance Compa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, claims the House bill allows workers to “decide in peace and quiet” whether they want union representation.

Compa has turned logic completely upside down by arguing that a public vote offers more peace and quiet than a private one. Imagine yourself inside the voting booth on Election Day with representatives of the candidates recording exactly how you vote.

Ironically, Compa goes on to say that “workers should be able to organize without fear-mongering by bosses or, by the same token, pressure from union organizers.”

Yet his solution is to substitute a “card check” process for a secret ballot that guarantees pressure from the union and its advocates.

Under current law, a vote on union representation must be held when at least 30 percent of workers in a company sign an authorization card asking for a vote. The vote itself, however, is done by secret ballot. The House bill would eliminate the secret ballot and create a process in which the union is approved when 50 percent of workers sign the card.

Supporters of this assault on democracy argue that management has an unfair advantage in a campaign for the hearts and minds of workers because it can force workers to attend meetings and threaten retribution if workers accept union representation.

But there are laws that govern behavior for both sides when union representation is being considered, and it makes no sense to address concerns about campaigning by management, which may or may not be as bad as the bill’s supporters say, with a process that is probably worse and clearly denies every worker a fundamental right to privacy.

Under the current rules, at least the worker has the right to vote his or her conscience without everyone knowing how he stands.

That’s the way it’s done in every other segment of society. Doing away with secret ballots just because union leaders aren’t getting the results they want is an insult to the intelligence of workers everywhere.

– Doug Alexander is executive director of Commonwealth Progress Council. This article recently appeared in the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The Bluegrass Institute is an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems.

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