LABOR’S SLIGHT GAIN

The Senate has two unattractive options as it contemplates the Employee Free Choice Act, a pro-labor measure that primarily changes the way potential unions may organize. The choices are to do nothing or accept an imperfect corrective to rising job insecurity and falling benefits that coincide with the loss of labor’s negotiating strength. The latter conditions should lead senators to recognize that one choice is preferable to the other.

At issue in the act is a provision that would change the secret ballot majority for National Labor Relations Board certification to what is commonly called “card-check,” in which a majority of workers sign cards indicating their support. The simpler standard would lead, presumably, to increased numbers of union members in an era marked by a long decline of union membership.

One of the reasons for that decline, say unions, is management’s ever-refined tactics for discouraging union participation – there’s an industry of anti-union consultants who use fear of plant closings and job loss as motivating tools – and outright firing of workers who do try to organize. One recent Cornell study found that one in every four employers surveyed had fired employees for union activity. The 2005 Wal-Mart example in Quebec, of closing an entire store rather than allow a union to become successful there, was one of the more prominent cases but hardly the only one.

Opponents of the act, including Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who was in Maine recently to discuss the legislation, say plausibly that switching to a card-check system will encourage workers to intimidate colleagues into signing cards, and that they will show up at workers’ homes and make workplaces difficult for those who disagree with organizing. This level of intimidation is unacceptable, and senators should encourage amendments to the act to further discourage it.

But if they have to choose between the types of possible intimidation, they would do better to support a measure that helps to restore the balance of power that has shifted toward management as unions have weakened in a global market with highly mobile capital, changing types of jobs and discord within unions themselves. The House passed its own version of the Employee Free Choice Act last month. The president will likely veto it if it reaches his desk.

Union membership in the United States has been falling for decades, and with it has gone some of its ability to be effective on such issues as working conditions, pay, benefits and job stability. It’s difficult to believe that card-check is the best answer Congress could devise to address power inequities in the workplace, but the bill before the Senate now is better than the status quo and an incremental improvement is better than none at all.