Assume there are 100 employees eligible to vote. 51 must vote yes to carry the issue, NOT the majority of the votes cast (imagine if we elected government officials that way!).

The vote is usually held on the work site. The company has months to tell workers to stay away from the voting site.

So how you vote is not so secret, is it? Showing up is considered a yes vote, staying away is a no vote.

Plus the company will break the law during the campaign. A judge found US Air’s acts way out of line in 1994. The results?

A measly fine and a revote one year later.

Employers should be developing programs now that will be better than anything a union could provide, including steps to increase employee involvement and to allow peer resolution of disputes. Such programs will ensure that their employees will not be interested in joining a union.

Making nonunion workplaces better for employees could be the real unintended consequence of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Basically, as long as management can count on its ability to browbeat workers going into a union election, there’s no need to improve the workplace. Screw labor, they can’t go anywhere else.

At my university, our classified staff (secretarial, clerical and janitorial employees) organized about three years ago. I was ashamed of the behavior of our administration. The VP for Business affairs said he’d retire before he allowed a union on his campus. So he refused to accept the card check, and demanded an election. The Board of Regents backed him. The administration browbeat classified staff and some faculty who supervised classified staff joined in.

When the election was held and the votes counted in public, people applauded (politely) at each YES vote. The VP for Business threatened to clear the room if people weren’t quiet. The union carried 70% for, 30% against.

Most of classified staff I know are fairly content with the union. The VP has retired, rather than deal with a union.

It’s a small victory, but every one moves things forward.

Any worker can join the IWW, anytime. Workers can join on their own and management can be presented with a fait accompli if all or a majority of workers are already union members.

But here’s the problem. Without unions, workers have no power (unless unemployment is so low that corps are forced to bid workers away from each other, 4% or lower). With unions, workers may also have no power if union leaders are corrupt, a far too frequent event.

But unionization is a threshhold event. After that, you gotta deal with the leaders in all the difficult ways we try to deal with our corrupt, unresponsive political leaders.