The great Mike Antonucci, founder of the Education Intelligence Agency and writer for the Intercepts blog, reports back on the results of the United Auto Workers’ organizing drive at Harvard:
Last February the United Auto Workers submitted authorization cards from approximately 60 percent of the graduate student teaching and research assistants. The union had every reason to believe it would win a vote, especially since UAW had just completed a successful election at Columbia University last month.
But when the ballots were counted, union opponents had garnered 53.4% of the vote.
Turnout in the election was about 77 percent of eligible grad students. Mathematically, there are still enough ballots under challenge to reverse the result, but it’s not likely. If all 314 challenged ballots are counted, the union needs to win the remaining vote by about 4-to-1 to prevail. They’d need to win by more than that if any significant number are rejected.
One grad student, Antonucci notes, tried to explain this surprising result to the Harvard Crimson: “[UAW Organizers] were extremely aggressive about getting you to sign the authorization card. They didn’t necessarily explain what the authorization card was, or what the union was. And they kept coming around multiple times…so I think a lot of people were like: ‘Hey, I’ll sign this thing, and so you’ll stop coming after me.'”
This helps explain why, early in the Obama era when Democrats had 60 seats in the Senate, labor unions were pushing so hard to go to a system where “card check” — the one-on-one collection of authorization cards — could establish them as the monopoly bargaining agent for all employees in a given workplace without there ever being a secret ballot vote. The legislation was misleadingly dubbed the “Employee Free Choice Act.”
The unionization rate has been in decline for decades among private-sector workers, one reason unions have taken to organizing on college campuses and attempted (until the Supreme Court put an end to it) to force the costs of union membership (but not the benefits) on Medicaid recipients who receive in-home care. Unions have been reaching for any edge they can get in organizing drives, and here’s at least one case where card check would have established a new, if modest, source of exposure and revenue for the UAW.
Later this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the new 2016 numbers on national union membership.
