Throw away your workers’ rights, or else.
That’s the message 33 Senate Democrats just sent to every major nonunion automaker in America. In a letter to the heads of 13 companies, including BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Tesla, the senators demanded they let the United Auto Workers intimidate their workers into unionizing. The threat could hardly be clearer: If automakers try to protect their workers, they’ll be punished.
Rarely will you see a more blatant assault on workers’ rights. The senators are trying to do via threats what they couldn’t do via legislation, which is to take away workers’ right to a secret ballot election. Democrats have tried to jam a similar policy through Congress multiple times in the PRO Act, but they could never get the votes.
No matter. If they can’t pass a law, they can target companies with subpoenas, hearings, and constant media vilification — all of which is implied by the senators’ letter and has happened many times before. The end goal is the same: force workers into unions, whether they want it or not.
The secret ballot election is workers’ single greatest defense against union manipulation. It lets workers vote in private, the same way people vote in every federal, state, and local election. Such privacy lets workers vote without fear of intimidation or coercion by outside parties.
Which explains why union leaders hate it so much. They want a “card check” process, in which union organizers ask workers to sign a card in favor of unionization. They can make the ask in front of workers’ peers — or even show up at their homes. The threat of intimidation is immense and obvious and countless stories prove it.
One former union organizer, for example, told Congress that he visited workers’ homes and “put them in fear of what might happen to them, their family, or homes if they didn’t change their minds.” The organizer testified that it worked: “Constant pressure at work and home was enough to make workers break.”
What unions hate about the secret ballot is what workers love. Polling shows that a stunning 70% of all households support the secret ballot, and so do 76% of union households. No one wants to be coerced into doing something they oppose. That’s especially true for the countless union members who’ve already been forced into unions against their will.
Ending the secret ballot is just one of the ways these Senate Democrats are trying to deprive workers of their rights. They ultimately want automakers to sign a so-called neutrality agreement. As I’ve documented, such agreements typically do three things. The first is to gut the secret ballot in favor of card check. Second, they give unions the personal information of every worker at a company — another violation of privacy and another invitation to intimidation.
Finally, neutrality agreements put a gag order on companies, prohibiting them from talking to their workers about unionization. Yet that violates workers’ right to the full information they need to make the best choice. And that’s exactly why unions want to shut companies up — because it makes workers easier to control.
The Senate letter is part of a larger campaign to let unions run roughshod over workers’ rights. The Biden administration has already instituted backdoor card check, in which secret ballot elections can be thrown out in favor of immediate unionization. And it is pushing a slew of other regulations that are as pro-union as they are anti-worker.
Do workers have any hope? A more worker-friendly Congress and presidential administration could champion the Employee Rights Act, which protects the secret ballot and worker privacy. But for right now, workers’ best hope is in the states.
Last year, Tennessee passed a first-in-the-nation law to protect workers’ rights. Today, any company that gets state incentives is required to hold secret ballot elections if unions try to organize them. That’s a big deal at automakers, which usually get taxpayer support. Tennessee has the fourth-most automaking jobs in the country. And now most if not all of those workers don’t need to fear union intimidation.
Workers in other states deserve the same protection, especially now as state legislatures come back into session. This is especially true in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama, to name a few. They all have large numbers of automaking jobs, and Republicans either control all three branches of government or have legislative supermajorities.
Senate Democrats and the Biden administration don’t care about workers’ rights, but they shouldn’t get away with threats against businesses and the people they employ. Workers deserve to have their rights protected — and not just at automakers.
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F. Vincent Vernuccio is president of the Institute for the American Worker.
