July 15, 1997
Elections, Extortion, and Unions
by
Charles W. Baird
Suppose Congress passed a law that abolished secret ballot elections for membership in Congress. Instead, each candidate, and his or her campaign workers, would collect signatures of support from voters. The signatures would be solicited, on a face-to-face basis, from each voter; and each voter could give his or her signature to only one candidate in each election. The winning candidate in any congressional district would be the one who collects signatures from a majority of the district's voters. Would you support such a change in the law? I certainly would not.
After all, in the secrecy of a voting booth a voter can cast an honest vote without anyone knowing how he or she votes. In a voting booth no one is watching. No one is applying pressure to vote one way or the other. All the campaigning is over, and the voter is left alone to make a private decision. Unless the voter tells, no one knows how he or she votes. In contrast, a person who gathers signatures does so by declaiming in favor of a specific candidate at the moment the signature is solicited. The solicitor's job is to persuade the voter to sign, and he or she knows who signs and who does not. An unscrupulous solicitor could retaliate or threaten to retaliate against a nonsigner. The selection of the winning candidate would not be free, it would be inherently coercive.
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) provides that employers may insist on a secret ballot election among their employees on the issue of whether or not the employees will be represented by unions in collective bargaining. An employer may agree to recognize a union for collective bargaining on the basis of signatures that union organizers have solicited from workers, but no employer can be forced to do so. When a union tries to organize the workers in a union-free workplace, its organizers must collect the signatures of at least thirty percent of the workers in order to force the employer into a secret ballot election. However, no amount of signatures, not even 100 percent, can force an employer to recognize a union without a secret ballot election.
The American union movement is not the American labor movement. In the private sector only 10 percent of the workforce is unionized. Unionized workers are a tiny subset of American labor, and that subset is getting smaller and smaller. By 2000 private sector unionization will be down to no more than 7 percent -- just where it was in 1900. Leo Troy, a labor economist at Rutgers University, calls this the symmetry of history.
John Sweeney, the overwrought president of the AFL-CIO, is aware of his increasing irrelevance in the private sector, and he is desperate to do something about it. Just now, for example, he is striving to organize the workers in the nursing home industry by enlisting the aid of well-intentioned, but ill-informed, clergy and journalists to pressure nursing home employers to recognize unions on the basis of gathered signatures rather than secret ballot elections. Some employers have capitulated to the pressure. Thus their employees are forced to accept the representation "services" of unions and even to become forced payers of union dues without ever having the chance to vote on it.
Worse yet, Sweeney and his cohort are proposing that Congress change the NLRA to force employers to recognize unions whenever organizers collect the signatures of a majority of workers at any workplace. They claim that elections take too long and that employers have an opportunity to campaign against unionization before the votes are cast. They assert that employers should have nothing to say about unionization. It should be a matter left between workers and those who solicit their signatures.
Without putting too fine a point on it, unions and their organizers have a reputation for aggression and violence. And that reputation is well deserved, as documented in a huge study of union violence undertaken by researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It is reasonable for workers to fear that if they refuse the blandishments of union organizers collecting signatures, they will pay a heavy price. In any other setting, we would call such an arrangement extortion.
Shame on those employers who turn their workers over to labor unions without a secret ballot election. And shame on Congress if it ever capitulates to the unions' demands for signature-based recognition in place of secret ballot elections. In 1996 labor unions spent a total of $300 million, in financial and in-kind donations, most of which they didn't have to report, supporting politicians who they think are sympathetic to their agenda. Will Congress ever sell the right to secret ballot elections in exchange for campaign donations? I hope not, but Congress has done little to justify anyone's confidence in its common sense. As Will Rogers said, "The country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer."