EFCA… Forget The Secret Ballot; Note The Secret Agenda

May 17, 2009 1 Comment ›› Erik Wong

By Patrick McIlheran

http://www.jsonline.com/

The Employee Free Choice Act, which would take away employees’ free choice about whether to join a union, has brighter prospects now that Arlen Specter is in the mood to compromise.

This is wretched news, of course, because secret ballots matter (I’ll point out why in Sunday’s Journal Sentinel) and because the bill also imposes binding arbitration on company-union negotiations. As George McGovern recently put it, this is lunacy.

Diana Furchgott-Roth points out that Specter’s compromise might well be to give way on the secret ballot – unions would have to swallow not winning 100% of the time – but include the arbitration. This still works from the union standpoint.

It rescues them from insolvency, says the former Department of Labor chief economist. Here’s how:

“Failing pension plans are a major problem for unions. Unions create these multiemployer, collectively-bargained plans in order to provide retirement income for workers in several different places of employment. This requires the union, the sponsor of the plan, to negotiate with each employer to join and contribute to the fund.”

How bad off are the union pension funds? SEIU has only three-quarters the money it’s promised to beneficiaries. The Sheet Metal Workers Union has 42%. Non-union plans are much better off.

Here’s where arbitration comes in:

“If the arbitration panel were to require a firm to join one of the many underfunded plans, the firm could well become liable for the pensions of workers, some already retired, of other firms. This would generate an inflow of new cash to the plan but harm the financial position of the firm. According to Brett McMahon, vice president of the construction company Miller and Long, ‘Strengthening underfunded plans is an unstated union motive for seeking mandatory arbitration.’”

Say an employer were forced into a fund like the Teamsters’ Central States fund – exactly the issue in the recent Waste Management strike here:

“Under a multiemployer pension fund such as the Central States fund, if some contributors go out of business then others have to pay the obligations. This concept is known as ‘last man standing.’ . . . With fewer workers joining unions, the collectively-bargained multiemployer pension funds are characterized by an increasing number of retirees supported by fewer younger workers. Many systems are typical Ponzi schemes, with new contributions paid out in benefits rather than being saved for contributors’ retirement.

“Union pension funds can only survive through new contributions. That’s why unions will do anything to raise participant levels—including taking away secret ballots and forcing workers into underfunded pension plans.”

How to hobble honesty

Posted: May. 16, 2009

Rian Wathen, who used to organize in Indiana for the United Food and Commercial Workers union, lets on something you could have guessed. It’s that not all union organizers are equally honest.

This matters because union organizers are selling something – as Wathen puts it, “hopes, dreams and visions” that an employee’s life will get better if only he signs a card. There’s a move afoot to remove a safeguard on that sale – sort of like banning disclaimers, price tags and Consumer Reports.

It’s important to remember, says Wathen, that union organizers are salesmen. He was one, until he blew the whistle on his union’s financial chicanery and got fired. Now he’s a “union avoidance consultant.”

More on that later, but, he points out, the sales orientation was so explicit that his union hired a sales consultant to train organizers in moving prospects through a four-step emotional process toward closing the deal. This shocked no one, he said. Rather, “a light bulb went off: ‘A-ha! This is what we had been doing.’ ”

What good organizers do, says Wathen, is find out how an employer is irritating an employee, then they “build the pain.” Emphasize the grievance, explain that a union would make it stop. This doesn’t have to be dishonest. Often, the employer really is a crumb.

But what keeps the sale honest, he says, is that it’s followed by an election. Once a union collects signatures from enough would-be members – usually, 60% to 70% – it asks the feds to call a union election. Workers decide by secret ballot after about six weeks of campaigning whether they want the union.

A bill before Congress would overturn this – dictating instead that, once a union collects signatures from half a workplace’s employees, the union is installed without an election. This Employee Free Choice Act was thought to be dead, but that was before U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter defected to the Democrats. He says, feebly, that he’s still against the bill, but he’ll now face a Democratic primary in union-dominated Pennsylvania. No, the bill is very much alive.

This makes problems, says Wathen, for honest union organizers. Their careers hinge on how well they make the sale. There are all kinds of ways to bring in signatures. Take, for instance, the union-sponsored pizza party. You show up for the pizza, you sign the sign-in sheet, you don’t flip it over to read the disclaimer on the back reading, “I hereby authorize the union to represent me for the purposes of collective bargaining.” It happens, says Wathen. It’s legal.

It is also dishonest. The check upon organizers who get signatures this way or by paying bounties or by hitting up drunks or by showing up at someone’s house and applying pressure is that such signatures don’t stick. “In the end, those people won’t vote for the union,” he said, while people recruited by honest organizers are more likely to. The election is the furnace by which the honesty of organizers is tested.

Wathen, now paid by companies to beat organizing campaigns, is blunt about such employers: “You get the union you deserve.” The grievances are always the same, he says, and “it always has to do with the employer not being responsive.” Bad employers may think that decent pay can substitute for recognizing good work or listening to employees.

Wrong, and there’s nothing like surviving an attempted unionization to wake up employers, says Wathen. It makes most see the error of their ways and purge bad managers. If they don’t, they’ll likely face a second campaign, and, statistically speaking, in those “the union kicks their ass. As well it should,” said Wathen.

But if elections keep employers in line, they keep organizers honest, too. If there isn’t an election, then getting the irrevocable signature is all. Promotion in the ranks of union staff will depend entirely on how many names you get, not on whether the names say yes after due consideration.

“The honest organizer,” he said, “is going to be at a disadvantage.”