As Americans get ready to head to the polls, there is a voting rights issue that deserves their close scrutiny. The labor unions that are providing vital funding and grassroots muscle to Democratic candidates across the country want something in return for their generosity.
At the top of Big Labor’s wish list, is the deceivingly named “Employee Free Choice Act” (EFCA), a law that could have a chilling effect on the privacy of working men and women.
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This proposal – aka “card check” – is designed to make it much easier for union bosses to unionize workplaces. But to do so, EFCA subjects workers to the threat of intimidation and coercion by all parties involved; union organizers, management and coworkers. Under EFCA, workers would effectively lose their right to a private ballot in union-organizing elections.
The private ballot would be replaced with a card-check scheme where a union is organized if a majority of workers in a workplace simply sign a card, of course, in the presence of union officials urging their signature.
The problem for those candidates who have signed on to Big Labor’s organizing agenda is that EFCA is very unpopular with informed voters. At www.myprivateballot.com, you can read more, including polling conducted for the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW) in three states with battleground Senate races.
There, voters expressed strong concerns about replacing private ballot elections with the intimidating, coercive card-check scheme. At least 80 percent of voters in Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota believe that secret ballot elections are the cornerstone of democracy and should be used for unionization voting.
More than seven in ten voters in Colorado (72%), Maine (77%), and Minnesota (72%) say having a federally supervised secret and private ballot election is the best way to protect workers’ rights when organizing a union, with support on this question running equally as strong in union households as in non-union households. And roughly two-thirds of voters in Colorado (68%), Maine (72%), and Minnesota (65%) oppose EFCA.
If a foreign country made people vote under the eye of government officials, Americans would not consider it a fair and legitimate election. The American people fundamentally understand the importance of the private ballot in protecting the rights of voters to express their true wishes in all elections, whether it is for president, Congress, governor, school board or union-organizing elections.
Sensing that they are losing the public relations battle over what EFCA will mean for privacy in the workplace, Big Labor attempted to squeeze the proposal through Congress at the 11th hour by attaching it to legislation to rescue the nation’s financial system and avert an economic meltdown of historical proportions. Fortunately, EFCA was removed from latest form of the “rescue” package due to Republican opposition.
Workers dodged a bullet, but Big Labor will be back next year pushing this egregious legislation. EFCA already passed the House but failed in the Senate on a party-line vote.
If Democrats expand their majority in the Senate this November, there will be another full-court press to enact EFCA very early in the new Congress. The only way to stop this assault on worker privacy is for the American people to demand that workers have the same freedom to cast private ballots in union-organizing elections that we all have in deciding who will the next president and our representatives in Congress.
Ask or discern where all candidates stand on this important issue. The private ballot is a fundamental American right. It should never be taken away for any election. Private, secret voting is basic civics that must be preserved.
George Allen is a former governor and U.S. senator from Virginia. He is a consultant to the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.
