Unions are democracies. Corporations are dictatorships.
In unions, workers vote for leaders who represent their interests to an employer. In corporations, one person, the CEO, rules in consultation with a politburo, the board of directors.
Corporations are, in effect, totalitarian regimes.
Congressman Buck McKeon is against unions, and a strong supporter of corporate dictatorships.
It's odd, then, to read
Buck McKeon's opinion piece in today's
Signal, where he appears to champion the cause of democracy in the workplace. He claims that if Democrats pass the Employee Free Choice Act, they would:
...betray the very principles of freedom and democracy that they so eloquently and vociferously defended.
What's going on here?
Basically, Buck is being dishonest. And he knows it.
Here's the deal. Under the National Labor Relations Act, corporations can demand a secret ballot before recognizing a new union. This secret ballot is supposed to help workers determine whether or not they should unionize.
But corporations don't want workers to unionize. They have no incentive to hold free and fair elections. In fact, they have strong disincentives, because unions make a lot of demands on CEOs, like better pay, benefits, and working conditions. The best way for a corporation to guarantee that their workers never unionize is to demand a secret ballot but never actually hold one.
This is exactly what happens. Workers rarely get to vote on forming unions because employers can delay elections forever.
It's like ordering Saddam Hussein to hold free and fair elections. Saddam would just laugh in your face.
The Oakland Tribune
explains:
...corporate threats, intimidation and eventual firings have become common for union activists. By dragging out the election process, companies often succeed in wearing down union enthusiasm....
The Employee Free Choice Act, known as "card check," makes workplace voting easier, and takes away a company's ability to demand and then block secret elections.
Buck McKeon paints the current debate as a choice between secret ballots and open ballots. But the real choice is between open ballots and no ballots at all.
The dissembler
states:
Put another way, card check may bring forced unionization through peer pressure, or worse, coercion and outright intimidation.
But corporate intimidation is the standard practice today. This is one reason union membership has dropped in the past few decades. And as unions became weaker, worker salaries stagnated, CEO salaries skyrocketed, and the bottom dropped out for the middle class.
Republicans like to point out that Obama was elected by a secret ballot, but now he wants to get rid of the secret ballot system for unionizing. That's true. But presidential elections are mandated by the U.S. Constitution. American workers have no law that guarantees workplace elections, and no impartial referee to supervise those elections.
This needs to change.
The Employee Free Choice Act can, must, and will become law.
If we can bring democracy to Iraq, surely we can bring it to corporate America.
