One-Sided Speech Is Not Democracy

Paul Pimentel from the Sheet Metal Workers, otherwise known as Paul VA, is blogging live today on the Employee Free Choice Act hearings now under way on Capitol Hill. The Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800), supported by a bipartisan coalition in Congress, would level the playing field for workers and employers and help rebuild America’s middle class.

Gordon Lafer, formerly a union researcher and now a professor at the University of Oregon, recounts a warning from Alexander Hamilton, “power over a man’s purse is power over his will.”

He points out how in federal election laws, employers cannot coerce employees over their vote. Those same economic protections applied to voters, however, does not apply to workers in union elections.

Lafer discusses the free speech rights pro-union workers do not have at work. Management is free to express its views on the union at any time, supervisors are urged to hold one-on-one meetings with employees making their pro-management views know, but at the same time, pro-union supporters are banned from discussing the union or posting pro-union literature anywhere in the workplace. Even worst, he describes how employers can force employees to attend mass meetings where pro-union employees are told that if they speak they can be fired on the spot. 

Lafer also makes a very interesting suggestion by pointing out:

If during the 2004 election, the Bush administration could have forced every voter in America to watch the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth movie, with no opportunity for response from the other side—or if the Democrats could have forced everyone to watch Farenheit 9/11—they might well have seized the opportunity—but no one would have called it democracy.

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