Writing about the “Employee Free Choice Act,” the labor-backed bill which would ban secret ballot elections for unions (a piece of legislation even George McGovern–George McGovern!–opposes), Thomas Frank writes today in the Wall Street Journal that corporations should extend the bill’s supposed protections to pretty much every aspect of business:
The business community has opportunities every day to stand up for a “democratic workplace.” Why don’t the Chamber’s member companies just let their workers vote whenever management wants to increase the deductible on their health insurance? Why doesn’t the Employee Freedom Action Committee run indignant TV commercials every time a company moves a factory overseas without first consulting its work force? Where’s the right to vote on the job when companies decide — as they do year after year — to hold the line on wages?
The answer, of course, is that most workplaces aren’t democracies at all. They are dictatorships, of varying degrees of benevolence.
Frank is right that “workplaces aren’t democracies at all.” Nor should they be. Workers should be able to vote, as a collective, whether or not to have a union. (Just as a board of shareholders can vote, one presumes, to oppose them.) And, like any legitimate vote, those elections should be done in secret. But, though Frank may not realize this, people work in the United States voluntarily, and have no right to demand unspecified benefits upon signing a contract. The reason why workers don’t get a vote on matters like health insurance deductibles or moving a factory overseas or the salary of a company CEO is because workers, at least in capitalist societies, do not control the companies for which they work. Shareholders do. It’s problematic, of course–but preferable to every alternative that history has presented.
And it’s not as though workers behave like angels when they have executive power. (Collective farming, anyone?) Frank complains about the “intimidation and coercion” employed by businesses in the run-up to union elections, citing:
51% of union organizing drives, management made some sort of threat to close its operation down if the union won the election. Ninety-two percent of companies facing union elections made employees attend “captive audience meetings”; 67% had employees attend weekly “supervisor one-on-one” meetings; 70% sent out “anti-union letters”; 55% showed “anti-union videos”; 34% gave “bribes or special favors” to anti-union employees; and 25% simply fired pro-union employees.
If a corporation–which supplies workers with their livelihoods–doesn’t believe that a union would be beneficial for the overall health of the company, its shareholders, and its workers, shouldn’t it at least have a right to inform their employees why? I agree that pro-union employees should not be fired–but such firings are already constitute violations of law under the National Labor Relations Act. But what’s “coercive” about showing employees “anti-union videos” or sending out “anti-union letters”? It’s hardly akin to murdering workers who cross picket lines.
