So the "Coalition for a Democratic Workplace" (Orwellian!) is pissy because The Washington Post has offered support for the compromise Employee Free Choice legislation being negotiated in the Senate, which eliminates majority sign-up in favor of an accelerated election with a mail-in ballot and moves first-contract arbitration to the "baseball" model. Of course, now that business interests have succeeded in taking the original majority sign-up procedure off the table, they're still opposing the legislation -- now calling it "postcard check" -- because they don't really care about workers' rights, they just don't like unions. It all becomes clear in this paragraph, which comes after the outright lie that the new legislation would give organizers "unfettered" access to employees at their workplaces:
Unions already enjoy significant access to employees outside of the workplace: They can visit employees' homes and approach workers in parking lots and other public places. Giving professional organizers unprecedented workplace access would disrupt productivity and infringe on worker privacy.
Remember when business was in a tizzy because those malicious union organizers might come to your house and intimidate you into signing up for card-check? (Never mind there's no evidence intimidation is happening.) Now it's apparently the employers' preferred outcome. One also wonders if they think the unfettered access management has to employees is any kind of infringment on worker privacy.
The author here suggests that federal election standards might be a good way to look at NLRB. Well, that's a framing of the debate we can agree on! To understand just how unfair the current union organizing process is, federal election standards make a nice standard. Here's a somewhat oversimplified animation on the subject, and here's a much more rigorous study of the differences. And, for the hat trick, here's a chart:
If the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace wants to start the argument with those standards, by all means, let's have it.
-- Tim Fernholz
