Source: http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=322183851682078
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Labor: In the same week legislation that would kill the secret ballot used to form a union is introduced, a poll finds fewer than one in 10 non-union workers wants to join a union. No wonder coercion is necessary.
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The bill is called the Employee Free Choice Act. But instead of liberating workers, it would enslave them to unions.
Under current law, a work force is organized when a simple majority of workers, voting with secret ballots, approves of unionization. The Employee Free Choice Act, more appropriately called the card check bill, turns that honorable practice on its head.
If it becomes law, unions would be certified if a simple majority sign the cards that are used to gauge employee interest in voting on union participation. The signing is done publicly, where workers are vulnerable to intimidation from union representatives.
Further, the bill requires government arbitrators to step in and set the terms of the initial contract if the union and management can't agree on a deal three months after certification.
If workers don't lose the private ballot, unions' place in the U.S. work force will continue to diminish. Private-sector unionization, at 7.6% in 2008, has been steadily falling since its 1958 peak of 39%.
Clearly, workers have learned that self-reliance, productivity, investing and an entrepreneurial spirit, not dependence on the union, is the key to advancement. According to a Rasmussen poll taken Friday and Saturday, only 9% of nonunion workers would want to join a union, while 81% would not.
There is no increase in union interest among employees who are afraid they will be laid off in the near future. Only 9% of those workers say they would want to be in a union.
The political left, long in line with organized labor, is pushing hard for card check legislation, betting that it will boost falling private-sector union membership.
But there's a downside to expanding the rolls, according to Anne Layne-Farrar, an economist with the Law and Economics Consulting Group. She believes card check "would likely increase the U.S. unemployment rate and decrease U.S. job creation substantially."
If the law "were to increase the percentage of private-sector union membership by between 5 and 10 percentage points," she reckons, "unemployment would increase by 2.3 million to 5.4 million in the following year and the unemployment rate would increase by 1.5 to 3.5 percentage points."
The reason is that labor, when organized, becomes more expensive.The average worker likely isn't aware of Layne-Farrar's findings. But as the Rasmussen poll clearly reveals, he or she instinctively knows that union membership is overrated.
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