The Big Lie About The Big Lie About The Employee Free Choice Act

by Ned Rice

It all started with an innocent-looking email, this one from the collective bargaining entity which represents me as a network television writer.  Along with the usual minutia there was a note requesting my support for the Employee Free Choice Act, a law which would allow employees to vote on unionizing while dispensing with some of the niceties we’ve come to associate with voting in this country— like, uh, the secret ballot.  Hence “free choice,” in the sense that it’s not free and it’s not your choice. 

Like most sentient, English-speaking people I oppose the EFCA because it would invite the browbeating of workers into unionizing whether they wanted it or not– which is why I suspect President Obama supports it.  I expressed these sentiments to the collective bargaining entity which represents me as a network television writer and before I knew it a lively exchange was underway between me and a self-described “union organizer”– which sounded suspiciously to me like “community organizer.”  That should have been my first clue.

The union organizer’s email response breezily assured me that the notion that EFCA would take away the secret ballot was totally, absolutely false.  (This, apparently, is the Big Lie we’re all being told by the Business Lobby, whatever that is.)  Instead, workers would decide if they wanted to vote (on unionization) by either a secret ballot or by the much more public “card count” system, the latter being the clear preference of EFCA supporters.  (Oddly enough, the card count system–  in which each employee signs either “yes” or “no” on their union card and then hands it in– is also the one in which each worker’s vote would become public knowledge.)  Workers can also petition to have a secret ballot election if they choose to, my new union organizing friend helpfully added-which immediately brought to mind the following scenario: 

EXT:   TOWN SQUARE IN SMALL SOUTHERN TOWN, JIM CROW ERA  

We see a RACIST SHERIFF, several BLACK CITIZENS.

RACIST SHERIFF:  Y’all want a secret ballot for the sheriff’s election tomorrow, or would a simple show ‘a hands do? 

(INCREDIBLY TENSE BEAT)

BLACK CITIZEN #1:  Show of hands’d be just fine, Sheriff.

RACIST SHERIFF:  Thought so.  Hope I can count on all of your votes.  Now, git.

EXEUNT

In my response to the organizer’s response I pointed out that such a system is practically designed for voter intimidation, whether on the part of management or by pro-union activists.  I added that a secret ballot was an obvious requirement of any legitimate election, and wondered on what grounds anyone could possibly object to requiring a secret ballot for an election of any consequence.  In other words, if your goal is for every voter to be able to vote his or her conscience without the possibility of outside influence, by either side, what better way to guarantee that than by making the secret ballot not an “option” but, rather, your standard operating procedure? 

His response to all this, I noticed right away, was not quite so chipper.  At no point did he address the heart of my argument: the fact that no election can truly be called free and fair in the absence of a secret ballot.  Instead, he adopted a more patronizing tone, blithely assuring me that Jimmy Hoffa-style tactics (on the part of union activists) went out a long time ago, then asking, “Have you ever met a union organizer?”, which I take it he was saving as his big, knock-out punch question.  He was, after all, a veteran union organizer who’d attended many union organizing drives.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t always been a TV writer. I was born and raised in a union town (Detroit), in a family which contained several labor union members, including (for a time) myself.  Unlike my union organizing friend, whose main concern seemed to be that TV writers get their full union benefits, I know what it’s like to live among people who earn their living in factories, on heavy equipment and on assembly lines because I used to be one of them.  These are the people, not television writers, whose lives would be most impacted by the EFCA.  As a member of the UAW I found out what some of the benefits and drawbacks of union membership were.  Without going into a lot of detail, I know why less than 20% of the U.S. workforce are union members (less than half of that if you exclude government workers), and it’s not just because of pressure from management.  In fact, according to the pro-EFCA propaganda…uh, I mean website I was provided with in the initial email, some 64% of U.S. workers who declined to join a union say they did so without any pressure whatsoever from their employers. 

The truth is, I’m all for unions, at least in theory.  Union membership makes sense for some people in some occupations, like it does for me in my current one.  What I’m against is the strong-arming of people who just want to do their work and be left alone into joining unions so as to swell the numbers (and coffers) of Organized Labor for political purposes, which appears to be the purpose of the EFCA.  Unless I’ve overlooked something, the claim that making secret ballots “optional” gives voters more say on whatever it is they’re voting on is simply a lie.  My union organizing friend’s position–  saying that the EFCA takes away the secret ballot is a lie–  is itself a lie.  It’s a big lie, in fact, which is why I plan not to support the so-called Employee Free Choice Act.  That is what I wrote in response.    

It’s been three days now and I’m still waiting to hear back from my union organizing friend at the collective bargaining entity which represents me as a network television writer.  Perhaps even now he’s out there in the trenches, leading another union organizing drive on behalf of yet another group of exploited, oppressed, over-worked and under-paid members of the American work force.     

Like maybe the writers on “The Bachelor.”


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Posted Mar 7th 2009 at 6:43 am in Entertainment, Political Humor | 359 Comments