http://blog.aflcio.org/2007/07/10/labor-boards-union-election-process-neither-free-nor-fair/by Mike Hall, Jul 10, 2007
Free and democratic elections? You won’t find them in the U.S. workplace. In fact, a new report shows that when U.S. workers try to form a union under the rules of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they are operating under a system that more closely resembles the phony “free elections” in authoritarian regimes—those the U.S. government traditionally has condemned.
Gordon Lafer, Ph.D., a University of Oregon political scientist and author of Neither Free Nor Fair: The Subversion of Democracy Under National Labor Relations Board Elections, says:
Anti-union employers are making a mockery of the principle governing American elections. Weak labor laws allow anti-union employers to manipulate the outcome of union elections in a manner that is inherently unfair and undemocratic.
Union-busting activity in the weeks leading up to union elections resembles practices that our government routinely denounces when performed by rouge regimes abroad
He says passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is “critical” to ensuring America’s workers have a truly democratic process in choosing to join a union.
The report, released today by American Rights at Work, comes just weeks after obstructionist Republican senators blocked a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act. Echoing the multimillion dollar corporate propaganda campaign that sought to undermine support for the bill, anti-worker lawmakers claimed the bill would take away workers’ rights to secret ballot elections if employees are allowed to choose to join a union when a majority signed union authorization cards.
That argument, no matter how often it is repeated, is wrong on two fronts. First, the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate secret ballot elections. Secondly, under the current NLRB, government-run election process, the report points out there are a
myriad ways in which workers are denied the most basic tenets of democracy…
and in fact, Neither Free Nor Fair
addresses head-on the claim that the NLRB election process guarantees workers a truly secret ballot—the central claim of anti-union advocates who seek to keep the current NLRB system in place….
FULL story at link.