Should You Care About Card Check?

By Marc Tracy

NOTE: CORRECTION AT BOTTOM.

It appears that one of the central battles involving business, small business, and especially the leading small business lobby, the National Federation of Independent Business, is about to be joined. The Obama administration is getting ready to roll out its strategy concerning the Employee Free Choice Act--so-called card check legislation--which it hopes to pass sometime in the late spring/early summer, the New York Times reports. Specifically, Vice President Joe Biden will lay out Thursday in a speech to the annual conference of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the über-labor organization, how the president will seek to pass the law (including getting to 60 votes in the Senate). The bill would eliminate the secret ballot for unionization and by all accounts make it easier for workers to organize (and harder for employers to try to stop organization). If it is passed, workers at a given company or factory or what-have-you could be considered unionized if a majority of them sign cards indicating a willingness to unionize.

"Business leaders have warned of Armageddon in their fight to kill the bill," the Times says, and it's difficult to accuse them of hyperbole once you read the NFIB on the subject. "The battle lines are drawn," the group announced in a recent article. The NFIB comes across, to us anyway, as disingenuous when it tries to cast its opposition to the bill as looking out for the best interests of employees. It is not that it is by definition wrong--an argument could be made that here, the interests of unions and ordinary employees are not perfectly aligned, and so that taking away the secret ballot in favor of increased unionization is a bad deal for ordinary employees. But everyone knows the NFIB is not, and should not, be in business to look out for employees' rights. And the NFIB's charges that the Obama administration's support for the bill is payback for union support during the election fails to deal with the bill's merits and sounds downright naive to boot.

The group is best, in other words, when it purports to be looking out for the small businesses. Which it does make an attempt to do regarding the EFCA.

The NFIB's objections, and other business groups' objections, is that the law takes the precarious equilibrium balancing out management and labor and tilts it heavily in labor's favor. According to the NFIB, unions win about 50% of secret ballots and 90% of card check campaigns (which are currently allowed, if management okays it; management also has the current right to reject them in favor of secret ballots). Given that, one is left to question if there weren't a fairer solution than preventing management from ever insisting upon a secret ballot. (The counter-argument would hold that the equilibrium is not being upset but rather that, after decades of drastic union decline, it is being reinstated. A bunch of prominent economists signed a statement to that effect recently, which can be read here.)

Ultimately, we feel that the NFIB and other EFCA opponents could be doing a better job persuading us that the bill is truly primed to hurt small business interests, and in an unfair way. The NFIB has an especially uphill battle since, as Fortune points out, the National Labor Relations Board doesn't even certify unions at firms whose annual revenue doesn't exceed $500,000, and would continue not to do so under the EFCA. So lots of small businesses couldn't be affected by the law; and it seems safe to assume that many others who could be affected by it still will likely not. (We can't imagine five-employee, $1-million-per-year firms, for example, are going to be particular targets for unionization.)

If the business lobby or the NFIB puts forward a compelling reason why the EFCA harms small businesses in an inequitable fashion--as opposed to crying crocodille tears for beleaguered, rights-denied employees, or accusing the Obama administration of doing things for its supporters (as though that weren't how politics has always worked)--then we'll be the first to report on it. 'Til then...

As a comment points out, the EFCA would not eliminate the secret ballot, but would rather give employees the option of card check instead of a secret ballot. We apologize for the error.

Comments (1)

March 2, 2009 12:10 PM