Card Check and Unions

From Clayton Cramer's blog:

"Card check" is a proposal for streamlining union elections, by deleting the "election" part.

Just to be sure about this, I went and read the version that went nowhere in Congress last year, proposing to amend 29 USC 159(c):

 

(6) Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, whenever a petition shall have been filed by an employee or group of employees or any individual or labor organization acting in their behalf alleging that a majority of employees in a unit appropriate for the purposes of collective bargaining wish to be represented by an individual or labor organization for such purposes, the Board shall investigate the petition. If the Board finds that a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed valid authorizations designating the individual or labor organization specified in the petition as their bargaining representative and that no other individual or labor organization is currently certified or recognized as the exclusive representative of any of the employees in the unit, the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative described in subsection (a).

Now, I can somewhat understand the argument that if a majority of the workers have signed union cards, then perhaps there's no need for a union election. (Hence the bill's description of this as "streamlining" the process.) But according to Dr. Lott, the union only wins these elections about 60% of the time. Huh? If a majority are willing to sign union cards, why would a majority not vote for the union at election?

The term "union thug" comes to mind.

 ...from my experiences, and that of many others that I know, I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):

 

Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.

I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can't you go to work anyway?"

 

"Not if you want to live."

 

And unfortunately, this wasn't just his imagination. There's a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion.