Card Check: Can It Organize the Unorganized?

[Omaha Steve]

http://labornotes.org/node/1943

— Kim Moody


Employers do everything in their power to make sure workers don’t get a chance to vote for a union. They flout labor law, making a joke of the familiar National Labor Relations Board procedures where the government’s job is to oversee a “fair fight” election between the union and the boss.

As a result, unions have embraced neutrality agreements and card check procedures as an alternative road to growth. Since the mid-1990s their use has accelerated.

Several studies say the win rate for card check is about 70 percent, compared with 55 to 60 percent for recent NLRB elections. The numbers recruited are also larger, mainly because the organizing targets are larger, too. The AFL-CIO says that three years ago its affiliates—before the split—organized 150,000 new private sector members by such procedures. That’s more than twice the 70,000 brought in through NLRB elections that year.

But the fact is that card check is still not widely used.

The NLRB is still the primary avenue to union recognition, although the data don’t take into account the number of workers involved in each drive.

Most unions, including the primary users of card check—UNITE HERE, Communications Workers (CWA), UAW, SEIU, and Steelworkers—still use the NLRB far more often. The Teamsters and SEIU used NLRB elections last year more than all AFL-CIO unions combined.

The exception is UNITE HERE, which seldom uses the NLRB.

FULL story at link.