The Enlightened Despot

There is something very strange about the card check debate that has been bothering me for a while. For those who aren’t familiar with card check, a quick summary:

In order for the employees of a firm to form a union, they need to have the support of a majority of all workers. In order to get the ball rolling, union organizers collect signed statements (’cards’) from employees saying they are in favor of unionizing. Once they have cards from a majority of employees, they approach management and ask to negotiate a contract. Management, of course, is not wild about this, so they aren’t going to take the organizers word for it that their cards are an honest representation of a majority of employees. The matter is resolved in one of two ways:

1.) The National Labor Relations Board holds a secret ballot election amongst workers on whether or not a union should be formed.

2.) The cards are handed over to a neutral third party, who inspects the cards and verifies that the signatures are authentic.

The latter system is card check. Both systems are currently in use - the legality of card check has been challenged, but never successfully. The debate is over legislation that would require employers to allow card check, rather than leaving them the right to demand a secret ballot.

Now, I must confess I had no idea what card check was until fairly recently. I’d always read about it, and knew that it had to do with unions, that liberals generally liked it, and that conservatives generally hated it, but that was the extent of it. When I finally looked into it, thought: “This has zero advantages over the alternative, and has the obvious disadvantage of inviting corruption and thuggery. Who could be in favor of this?”

But, oddly enough, the answer was: every reasonable left-leaning thinker I knew of. So I started looking back through posts about card check, trying to figure out what the arguments in favor of it were. I have yet to find one. What I’ve found instead is a host of arguments about how much room there is in the current system for employers to intimidate workers or otherwise rig the system, and how such violations are never seriously punished. So these folks advocate card check as a way to get around that corruption.

That, though, strikes me as a terrible argument for card check. If we have to pass legislation about this anyway, why not pass legislation that reforms the voting process, and requires serious penalties for employers who try to compromise it? This is not a rhetorical question. As I said, I don’t know much about this, so I really want to know: is there some argument for this system? Is it somehow easier to bring about than efficient, honest votes? Are all these liberals so enthusiastic about labor that they’re in favor of corruption that leads to more unions? Anyone?

Tags: corruption, difficult questions, unions

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under posts by Akhbar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.