What should be beyond debate is the right to work without being forced to join a union as a condition of employment or be coerced to join.
Commentary
The right of workers to organize a union among themselves is properly viewed as a facet of the free market, not an interference with it. The matter of the extent to which an employer should be able to resist unionization—even to the point of firing employees and refusing to engage in collective bargaining—is something else again and is worthy of debate. But what should be beyond debate is the right to work without being forced to join a union as a condition of employment, the right of employers to make the absence of a union as attractive an alternative as possible, and the right of workers to be free of any sort of coercion to join a union.
Charles Evans Hughes—one of the most remarkable figures in American history, who, before being appointed chief justice of the United States, had been governor of New York; associate justice of the Supreme Court; the Republican nominee for president in 1916, nearly defeating incumbent President Woodrow Wilson; and secretary of state under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—wrote the
decision in the 1937 Supreme Court case of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., which upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, enshrining the freedom to organize unions.
Hughes said: “Employees have as clear a right to organize and select their representatives for lawful purposes as [an employer] has to organize its business and select its own officers and agents. Discrimination and coercion to prevent the free exercise of the right of employees to self-organization and representation is a proper subject for condemnation by competent legislative authority.”
The chief justice noted that “such collective action would be a mockery if representation were made futile by interference with freedom of choice.”
Of course, Hughes was referring to businesses interfering with their employees choosing to form or join a union. But in recent decades, companies have wised up, lavishing their workers with
profit-sharing programs and
401(k) retirement plans that often include matching contributions from the employer and
coddling employees to such an extent that Fortune magazine has called it the “corporate equivalent of ‘the man in therapy.’”
In this modern employment environment, workers often conclude that a union is against their interests, and when they get pressured or coerced by union goons to join up, it is exactly the mockery of union representation being rendered futile by interference with employee choice of which Hughes warned—even though it is the union, not the employer, doing the interfering.
The indispensable remedy for this abuse of union rights is reliance on the secret ballot, without exception. Employees can outwardly act as favorably as they wish when organizers buttonhole them but then, in the private sanctity of the voting booth, make the decision based entirely on their own preferences, without fear of retribution.
This is what we saw in the
rejection of unionization by a 56 percent to 44 percent margin in the balloting of thousands of Mercedes-Benz factory workers in Alabama in May. Curiously, it followed a majority of more than two-thirds of the same workers petitioning the NLRB in April to hold the election, which conceivably might simply illustrate the eagerness of those opposing unionization to exercise their voting power against it for the world to see. More likely, what happened is that they signed the “card check”-style petition cards out of fear of pro-union co-workers, those cards not being a secret ballot. In card check procedures, business management does not see how individual workers voted, but union leaders do.
No one on the left would advocate for abolishing the secret ballot when it comes to elections for public office; from the votes of freed slaves in the Reconstruction era all the way to their dubious claims of racially based voter suppression today, they rightly insist that the privacy of a voter’s choice is essential to representative government.
“For people who might feel uncomfortable voting in increasingly politicized and charged environments, the privacy booth is a last-line defense,”
wrote Lily Hay Newman, an information technology senior writer at Wired, formerly with Slate magazine and the left-leaning New America Foundation.
According to Ms. Newman, secret voting also undercuts “the ability of any entity, foreign or domestic, to buy votes.”
“If you can’t be sure that someone voted a certain way, there’s no clear benefit to paying, blackmailing, or otherwise pressuring someone over how they vote,” she wrote. “As more and more challenges encroach, the privacy booth is a refuge—and increasingly, perhaps, a bunker.”
Although the Roman Republic
utilized the secret ballot, Cicero opposing the practice as demagogic, the
genesis of the secret ballot in the modern era goes back only to 1856 in Australia, its adoption in America beginning in 1888—in both countries as a quest to prevent riots and other forms of violence, as well as blackmail and bribery, that regularly accompanied open ballot elections.
“Today the secret ballot is assumed to be a fundamental part of democracy,” Paula Wasley of the National Endowment for the Humanities has
noted. “But for most of America’s history voting was a highly public act. Spectacularly public even, accompanied by boisterous crowds, partisan hecklers, torchlight parades, free-flowing whiskey, and brawling.”
Imagine the modern equivalent of that spectacle surrounding a highly public unionization ballot.
English author and philosopher Roger Scruton
noted during the height of the Cold War in 1982, “Voting procedure is open in the USSR, but the ballot is designated secret by the law (article 95 of the constitution); however, anyone who makes use of the procedure for casting his vote secretly is noted by the electoral officer, and disciplined accordingly.”
No less a personage than James Madison, in 1785, more than a century before the United States embraced the secret ballot, recommended it as “the only radical cure for those arts of electioneering which poison the very fountain of liberty.”
Big labor’s arguments against the secret ballot in unionization efforts center on depriving potential dues-paying members of information. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations has
claimed that somehow, voting privately means that employers “control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions” and that “no employee has free choice after being browbeaten by a supervisor to oppose the union or being told they may lose their job and livelihood if workers vote for the union.” Presumably, only pure passivity and silence on the part of management would be an acceptable stance to labor leaders.
In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) backed legislation greatly lessening the requirement for a secret ballot to unionize, offering the class warfare rationale that it would allow workers to “bargain for their fair share of the wealth our country creates.”
The lopsided April victory for the United Auto Workers to unionize Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant was clearly engineered artificially by the government, in no small part the
result of tens of billions of dollars in federal electric vehicle subsidies from the Biden administration, an electric SUV being one of the products that Volkswagen manufactures there; the union had lost previous votes to unionize in 2014 and 2019. The April win means that U.S. taxpayers will be paying for much of the fruits of the lavish future collective bargaining contracts there.
Union membership
is continuing its steady decline that started in the 1970s, reaching ever-new record lows, down to less than a third of the more than 30 percent of workers who were members of unions in the 1950s.
When employees have full information, when they hear the union and the company that provides their livelihood both make their cases, and when they can vote for their interests without fear, they will almost always reject the radical worker organizations found increasingly to be spending their dues money on radical political causes with no relevance to workers’ welfare.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
