The Union Card Ceck

 The importance of the union movement to working people, both on the job and more broadly, cannot be overstated. Epic fights waged by organized labor are responsible for everything from the eight-hour day to making the right to free speech real. Radicals in the unions — socialists, anarchists, and syndicalists — have been crucial to these battles.

About 14.8 million Americans are members of labor unions. The number has been declining for decades as businesses take a tougher approach in opposing union organizers. Over the last two years legislation has been passed in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan that has attempted to emasculate largely public workers of their union rights. In addition, right to work laws now exist in 23 states. These are big business’s biggest legislative weapon because they prevent Labor from bargaining contracts that require dues paying union membership for all employees at a work place. Without a united work force financially contributing to the resources of a union to defend its membership’s interests, it is left with a shoestring budget and a membership divided between dues payers and free loaders. This has resulted in a 9.4 percent decline for both organized and unorganized workers’ wages as well as declining safety and health conditions.

Organized labor now makes up less than 12% of the work force — down from about a third of all workers in the 1950s. With membership at historic lows for modern America, many see the long history of unconditional loyalty to the Democratic Party is a big part of the reason. Labor unions continue to put hundreds of millions of dollars of their members’ dues into this dead-end relationship. It's clear labor needs a new weapon to fight back against the employers. They need what's called card-check.

Under current law, if workers want to form a union then 35% of the workforce has to sign a petition or a card stating they agree to be unionized. From there, the National Labor Relations Board will set up an election and if half of the workforce votes to unionize, then they have a union. Under this current procedure, employers have several tools - both legal and illegal - to disrupt the organizing process including intimidating or firing employees, spreading lies and misinformation about unions, threatening to close down stores, delaying union elections, and so on. It's an uphill battle to organize, which is why union busters have been so successful breaking up unions, while organizers have had so much trouble starting new unions.

But card check would level the playing field. With card-check, there is no election and employers never have to catch wind of what's going on. Basically, if 50-percent of all the workers sign a petition or card indicating they support forming a union, then that union is immediately recognized by the NLRB without the extra added step of an election and without an opportunity for employers to twist some arms.

With card-check, unions can begin to reverse the tide in the war against labor. They can start demanding better wages and benefits. Unions need to defend their membership’s interests rather than make concessions to the employers as is usually done these days.

In 2008, when Democrats took control of Congress, there was a huge push by labor to have card-check passed. It was part of the Employee Free Choice Act known as EFCA. Unfortunately, those efforts failed, and ever since then, card-check has been absent from the national debate. Instead the unions have, for the most part, put their resources behind getting Democrat Party politicians elected even though this party shares equal responsibility with the Republicans in presiding over workers’ declining standard of living and rights. In addition, they cut Medicare, Medicaid, and most likely Social Security, as well as other needed public services, while rewarding the corporations with trillions in bailouts, loans, and tax breaks. Consequently, for too many workers, unions are viewed as just another “special interest” lobbying machine. Too often union leaders are more concerned with their own positions rather than fighting to improve the conditions for all workers.

Look at what’s happening at Walmart. Earlier this month in a dozen states, hundreds of Walmart workers held demonstrations outside their stores. And before that,  Walmart workers went on strike outside a store in Southern California. In Walmart’s 50-year history only once have employees successfully unionized and so Walmart closed that store. Which is why today it takes one Walmart employee, making on average $8.80 an hour, more than 76 million 40-hour weeks to accumulate as much wealth as just one of the Walmart heirs, Tim Walton, who’s worth $27 billion. Card-check would help in the effort to unionize Walmart. And if the world largest employers can be unionized, then any corporation can. Card-check, if it were passed into law, would be one of the best tools "we the people" have today to take on the corporate state.

Many workers do not understand what collective bargaining is and how they benefit from it even if they are not union members. If Labor were acting as a social movement non-union workers would see that Labor was putting up a fight for all workers’ interests against the greed of big business and would, therefore, understand from their own experience, where to stand. Labor must be willing to fight for all workers’ interests with mass demonstrations and strikes over issues that effect us all against the corporate interests that dominate the Democrat and Republican Parties.