Wednesday, February 28th, 2007...11:59 am
“As Long As I Count the Votes, What Are You Going to Do About It?”
I was poking around on an otherwise liberal blog and saw a blog ad stating that “unions want to take privacy from American workers!” This smacked of the silly campaign that the Arizona Chamber of Commerce ran against the increase in the minimum wage that argued that somehow it would violate people’s privacy.
Lo and behold! It is a campaign run by the US Chamber of Commerce.
They are looking to stop the progress of HB 800, a bill authored by George Miller of California (as opposed to Mayor George Miller or local activist Foothills George Miller) and co-sponsored by a raft of Democratic members including Raúl Grijalva and Ed Pastor. This bill would give labor movement their long demanded “card check” option.
Currently, a vote to unionize is held on company property. With the “card check,” workers interested in unionizing would instead merely need to sign cards. If a majority sign the cards, the union would be authorized. Opponents of the measure claim that this takes away the right to a secret ballot. But given that the vote is now cast on company property, where workers can be subject to all manner of cajoling (and yes, observation) by management, I am having a real hard time believing that these guys care one whit about the security and secrecy of the ballot. Labor activists have told me for years that this would be something like having me cast my ballot for president in Republican Party headquarters, but only after I’ve watched a Ronald Reagan documentary produced by Roger Ailes.
The US Chamber hopes to have a “Virtual March on Washington” for the future of “democracy.” Setting aside the silliness of the Chamber trying to act like they are big time populists that just want to help the little guy, I’m a bit offended that they would even for a second use the phrase “March on Washington.” Let’s see: actual March on Washington: a quarter of a million people travelled to Washington, led by A. Phillip Randolph (a labor organizer, by the way) and Martin Luther King Jr. to stand up for people that had been beat down and had nothing. This “virtual march”: people sitting at their computers sending e-mails so to support big buisiness against employees. Hmm…I don’t see the comparison.
2 Comments
February 28th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I am afraid I come down on the other side of the fence on this one.
The balloting should be secret, no ifs, ands or buts. There is simply to much potential for abusive pressure by _both_ sides once you start making people’s votes on the matter public.
If there are issues with having the actual votes take place on company grounds, then address that problem in different ways (by, say, mail in voting to an accredited tabulating firm, or something along those lines). The proposed “fix” just makes things worse by allowing workers to be subjected to even more harassment from additional sources.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
[…] - In my earlier post on this bill, I neglected to mention that both Gabrielle Giffords and Mitchell are also […]
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