By Kevin Mooney
Instead of pushing for legislation that will coerce workers into joining unions by way of “card check” organized labor should look for ways to make themselves more relevant to the needs of the 21st Century, James Sherk, a Heritage Foundation policy expert has argued.
The manufacturing economy of the 1940s and 1950s has been replaced with an information-based and knowledge-based economy, he points out. Computers have replaced jobs that involved a lot of repetition, Sherk explained.
“Who you are is what matters,” he said. “You are not just a cog in the machine. Individual talents, skills and initiatives are what count. In an economy where workers are much more mobile between jobs and there is no expectation of having one job for life unions make less sense because collective contracts are not as relevant.”
Unions are not beneficial to their host companies because they operate like cartels that restrict supplies and drive up costs, he observed. While this translates into higher financial returns for individual members, it comes at the expense of the overall economy, Sherk said.
The Employee Free Choice (EFCA) also known as “card check” was reintroduced earlier this month by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif. ) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). EFCA passed the House last March by fell short of the 60 votes required for cloture in the Senate. It is the major priority for organized labor this year.
EFCA would allow labor activists to gather signatures from 51 percent of employees to force a company to accept a unionized workplace. Current law requires a representation election in which workers are guaranteed a secret ballot.
Key proponents of EFCA such as Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), have predicted that if EFCA became law union membership would grow by 1.5 million members every year over the next 10 to 15 years.
But at the same time, Canadian provinces that have experimented with the same rule changes to unionization elections that U.S. policymakers are now considering suggest that America’s unemployment rate could jump significantly as a result of higher labor costs, a new economic study shows.
Beginning in the late 1970s and throughout the 1990s several Canadian provinces switched from using “card check” in union elections to a secret ballot. British Columbia moved back and forth between the two systems.
The economic data attached to these changes are a reliable indicator of what could happen in the U.S., since both countries are similar in culture and industrial composition, Dr. Anne Layne-Farrar, the author of the study, said in a recent conference call. Layne-Farrar is an economist with LECG Consulting. The employment differences that were registered between the Canadian provinces were used as a basis for the study.
If these Stern’s predictions materialize it means union membership would increase by 5 to 10 percentage points within a year of passing, Layne-Farrar said. Her study shows that this would result in an increase to the unemployment rate of one-and-a-half to three percentage points.
Using the labor figures recorded for this past January as a baseline the one-and-a half-to-three percentage point increase anticipated in Layne-Farrar’s study could result in unemployment as high as 10.6 percent with over three million jobs lost come January 2010, she said.
“Unions should try and change what they offer workers so their individual contributions are recognized,” Sherk, the Heritage expert said. “But instead they are trying to make it exceedingly difficult for workers to say no and to take away the secret ballot.”
With Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) now announcing that they will vote down the card check bill it beginning to appear less likely that it will pass this year. Blogger Rick Moran struck a cautionary note in a recent posting that puts the legislative climate into perspective.
He wrote: “At the moment, it could be a dead issue because the Democrats appear a few votes short of a filibuster proof 60 senators in favor of the bill. But labor has a lot of money and can make a lot of noise against reluctant Democrats. With that kind of raw power anything his possible.”
