Investor's Business Daily: Fight Card Check Scam Bill

Investor’s Business Daily has joined other newspapers to demand defeat of the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill:

Unions spent as much as $400 million in the 2008 election cycle to get labor-friendly candidates elected. They succeeded and now have made passage of the Employee Free Choice Act a priority. The Democratic leadership, having enjoyed the electoral fruits of the unions’ generosity, would like to oblige.

Despite its noble-sounding name, the legislation won’t expand freedom. The bill could be more accurately called the card check act, for it has nothing to do with free choice.

Quite the contrary, it seeks to reverse unions’ waning influence by eliminating the secret ballots that workers historically used to organize in a federally supervised election.

Instead, under card check, a union is certified when a majority of workers signs the cards that are now used to merely gauge employee interest in voting on union participation. These cards aren’t secret, so it’s a fundamental violation of the secret ballot principle.

It’s not hard to imagine the intimidation workers would be subject to when they’re offered cards to sign. And it’s not as if nonunion workers are clamoring to join a union but are afraid of management reprisals if they do. By more than a 3-to-1 margin, polls show, workers say [sic] don’t want to be part of organized labor.

Less well-known but just as harmful as the gross violation of privacy is a provision in the bill that authorizes government arbitrators to set the terms of the initial contract if the union and management can’t agree on a deal. At that point, workers have lost all control over the conditions of their employment.

Should card check be passed and signed, organized labor, using the new law like a nightstick, would aim directly at the low-price nonunion retailers that save consumers millions — like Wal-Mart. Should those companies become unionized, prices would be forced up so management could afford the inevitably expanded payrolls.

While a few workers would benefit from higher wages — at least those who remain after jobs are cut to accommodate rising labor costs — the millions of working-class Americans who benefit from low prices to keep their families fed and clothed would find life a bit tougher.

. . .

Unions, which represent only 7.5% of the private sector labor force, down from more than one-third in the 1950s, are so desperate to regain their lost power that they would abandon the very people they say they want to protect — struggling American families.

Right now, the worker’s best friends are a few senators in the South and a handful of state lawmakers willing to stand up for freedom, privacy and the companies that fuel our prosperity by providing us with jobs and affordable goods.