Video: What if Congress passed Card Check for all elections?

This humorous take on the EFCA comes from Save the Election, the 527 opposed to the Card Check legislation backed by Democrats, especially Barack Obama and Al Franken.  It mixes parody of Congress and the mainstream media with actual street interviews with people responding to the idea of eliminating secret ballots from union organizing.  Voters appear to value the secret ballot much more than Democrats do:

Pretty funny, although I think the Johnny Sac ads were more effective and got to the point much more quickly. This works as well, especially with the reactions Save the Election elicited from these interview subjects.

John Motley describes at National Review the effects of removing secret ballots from organizing efforts. It’s not pretty.  I emphasized the last line for a purpose:

The key offending provision of the bill provides that instead of a private election with a secret ballot that is overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, union organizers would only be required to obtain the signatures of 50 percent plus one of the employees in a workplace to certify a union. If union organizers were able to — by whatever means they can think of — collect enough signatures, the secret ballot would be unnecessary and eliminated from the process. This system is known as “card check” — a very un-American proposal.

As McGovern warned with this system: “there are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked or intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.” In hearings in the House of Representatives in 2002, Bruce Esgar, an employee of MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas described such a case when he testified that union organizers threatened that workers who did not sign union cards would lose their jobs when the union was recognized. In testimony in 2007, Ricardo Torres, a long-time organizer for the United Steelworkers felt compelled to quit his job, according to his testimony, after “a senior Steelworkers union official asked me to threaten migrant workers by telling them they would be reported to federal immigration officials if they refused to sign check-off cards.” Jen Jason, a former organizer for UNITE-HERE also testified in 2007 to the fact that they “rarely showed workers what an actual union contract looked like because we knew that it wouldn’t necessarily reflect what a worker would want to see. We were trained to avoid topics such as dues increases, strike histories, etc. and to constantly move the worker back to what the organizer identified as his or her “issues” during the first part of the housecall. This technique was commonly referred to as “re-agitation” during organizer training sessions.”

What does that recall for Hot Air readers?  Barack Obama’s days as a “community organizer”, as this is the Alinksy Method in action.  Small wonder Obama likes the idea of Card Check — it fits right into his mindset.

The EFCA will set back employee rights by decades and leave them at the mercy of both union bosses and management, torn apart in tugs-of-war in every workplace targeted by organizers.  Secret ballots have been the one true protection from exploitation that workers have.  The party that wants this protection stripped is no friend of the working class, but instead the cronies of union bosses looking for a massive increase in dues, personal income, and political clout.

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