Nothing to Fear from Labor Union Card Check
By Michael Boyajian
My father was a big labor union man. The unions put food on our table, gave us healthcare, put us through college and provided my dad with a pension when he retired. He had one rule for the family. We could talk about any politics that we wanted to around the kitchen table but we could never bad mouth the unions.
With that in mind and as the former labor judge for New York State, I decided to welcome Senator Arlen Specter aboard when he defected to the Democratic Party and to try and convince him that he had nothing to fear from card check. I don’t know if I got anywhere with him but at least I tried.
What is card check? It is a relatively new process for unionizing. Labor unions in New York State for instance can now employ card check in addition to the old method of secret ballot election. If you collect a majority of signed cards from workers they become unionized. The funny thing about this is that many unions still prefer elections to card check.
Still many people fear card check. Well, it’s been in use in New York State for a few years now and nothing bad has happened but for the economic meltdown and that was caused by Wall Street not the unions.
According to the New York Times unions in 2008 made up 12.4% of the work force. That was down from 35% in the 1950s. Why the decline? According to the Nobel Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, Paul Krugman, it was because corporate America declared war on the unions. You know corporate America they’re the ones we gave tax breaks to and in return they sent all our jobs overseas.
But there is good news. Unions grew by 400,000 members in 2008. Part of this number is reflected in former Governor Eliot Spitzer’s Executive Order 12, which I adjudicated, and resulted in the unionization of 50,000 child care workers in the state. Once again card check was used as was secret ballot election. Once again nothing adverse happened to the child care industry though lives and care were improved.
So the lesson in all of this is we have nothing to fear from unions or card check. They merely benefit workers and the services they provide without the occurrence of an economic apocalypse unlike corporate America which awarded themselves fat bonuses after they received bailouts from taxpayers when they incurred the loss of vast sums of money while toppling the world economy.
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