The Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2008, Wednesday

The Wall Street Journal

September 3, 2008, Wednesday

The Wall Street Journal

Happy Labor Day. Drop Dead.


This is the season for hypocrisy spotting. Pundits have pounced on the moral contradiction presented by the pregnant but unwed daughter of the right's latest family-values champion. They have figured out that riding the Amtrak home to Delaware doesn't automatically make Joe Biden a regular guy.

But as they ponder these personal failings of the mighty, it's easy to overlook the great, yawning hypocrisies that make up the very substance of political life. Take, for instance, the venomous backlash against the Employee Free Choice Act, a bit of union-backed legislation that might allow labor to start reversing decades of decline. Almost wherever there is a close race for a Senate seat, you can see TV commercials assailing the initiative in the most strident terms.

Currently, employees at a given workplace can form a union after a majority of them choose to do so in an election. The new legislation would allow them to do it after a majority of them sign cards. This "card check" system would surely make it easier to start unions, and naturally it is heavily opposed by the business community, which -- get this -- doesn't much like organized labor.

But that distaste isn't the real issue, to hear card check's opponents tell it. What offends, rather, is the threat that card check poses to democracy itself. This is not a battle over something low and ugly like money. This is a fight for principle, for the American Way. It is about the sacredness of the secret ballot, about every individual's right to express him or herself freely in elections at work.

The Employee Freedom Action Committee, a "nonpartisan" group based in Washington, D.C., declares that by fighting card check it is "protecting your right to vote on the job." Meanwhile, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, a creature of the Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, is running a series of TV commercials showing us the dark side of the melodrama, suggesting that card check will permit the intimidation of workers by union hoodlums, and even wheeling out an actor from "The Sopranos" to play this durable stereotype.

But why stop there? 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.

Nor do most big employers really have anything against intimidation and coercion during elections. These are the everyday tools of what is politely called "union avoidance," and companies routinely use them when their employees try to organize: Threats to move the operation abroad if the union wins the election; compulsory meetings to listen to anti-union propaganda; termination for select pro-union employees.

These practices are so well known that they have been the subject of reports by Human Rights Watch. They have been scrutinized by academics and quantified with scientific precision, most notably in a 2000 study written by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University and submitted to the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission.

Among its findings: In 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 American business was its own country, it would probably come in for sanctions from the State Department.

"There has been no such thing as a secret ballot for the 20 years I've been studying elections," Ms. Bronfenbrenner told me a few days ago. "Employers know exactly which way an employee is going to vote."

The corporate fight against card check annoys me in the same way that it annoys me to hear someone claim that France bailed America out during two world wars: It gets reality precisely, deliberately, diametrically wrong.

But it's more than the hypocrisy that should concern us, and it's even more than the ongoing violation of people's rights, human or civil. The destruction of the labor movement by tactics like these is a big part of the reason why wage-earners no longer rise as the economy grows, and why some day soon we will speak of the great middle-class nation in the past tense.