To check or not to check.

• Author: Scannell, Ray
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

T. A. Frank's assertion ["The Little Unions That Couldn't," January/February 2009] that allowing workers to decide whether to hold a union representation election or proceed directly to negotiations (i.e., "card check") with the employer is not, as he writes, a "substantively minor" part of the Employee Free Choice Act. It is a core component of the act, restoring to workers the right to decide, and limiting the power of the employer and its agents to coerce and intimidate.

In asserting the centrality of card check, one could raise the simple moral question of why it should be the employer's choice (as it is now) to force an election or choose to recognize the workers' union based on a majority showing of preference for union representation. After all, under the original National Labor Relations Act it is supposed to be the employee's choice, and the employer is supposed to stay out of it. While that right to choose has been inverted in most workplaces over the intervening years, workers retain the right in the construction industry. Why shouldn't service and manufacturing workers enjoy the same rights? On a practical level, too, Frank is wrong, because expedited elections will simply lead to expedited firings. An election can never be quicker than a firing. It only takes a minute to fire someone.

While the ILWU struggle with Rite Aid is a good example of the failure of current law, if Frank had spoken to other organizers he would have learned that the hurricane of employer fury, intimidation, and coercion is generally launched at the first sign of worker organizing and not simply when an election petition is filed. Most organizing unions counsel workers not to sign cards until the penultimate moment, knowing that once word of the authorization cards spreads in the workplace the employer's attack will surely begin. So, by the time cards are signed, workers generally have been subjected to anti-union propaganda and employer...