‘Wall Street Journal’ Columnist Takes on Corporate ‘Hypocrisy’ over Employee Free Choice

by James Parks, Sep 3, 2008

Workers and supporters argue that the Employee Free Choice Act is necessary to balance the coercive tactics employers use to thwart employees’ freedom to form unions and bargain. Now comes support for that argument from the bastion of pro-business journalism, The Wall Street Journal. 

Writing in today’s Journal, columnist Thomas Frank calls the Chamber of Commerce’s and corporations’ “venomous backlash” against the Employee Free Choice Act one of the “yawning hypocrisies that make up the very substance of political life.” 

America’s workers have made passage of the legislation an issue in the 2008 election. If enacted, the Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to decide freely how they want to choose a union, including signing union cards—a method known as “majority sign-up.” 

Across the country, heavily funded corporate front groups, such as the so-called Center for Union Facts, the Employee Freedom Action Committee and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, are running ads that attack congressional candidates who support the bill.  

Frank says the corporate arguments against majority sign-up, claiming concern for workplace democracy, don’t hold up. 

But why stop there? The business community has opportunities every day to stand up for a “democratic workplace.” Why don’t the Chamber’s member companies just let their workers vote whenever management wants to increase the deductible on their health insurance? Why doesn’t the Employee Freedom Action Committee run indignant TV commercials every time a company moves a factory overseas without first consulting its work force?  

The answer, of course, is that most workplaces aren’t democracies at all. They are dictatorships, of varying degrees of benevolence. 

Nor do most big employers really have anything against intimidation and coercion during elections. These are the everyday tools of what is politely called “union avoidance,” and companies routinely use them when their employees try to organize: threats to move the operation abroad if the union wins the election, compulsory meetings to listen to anti-union propaganda, termination for select pro-union employees. 

He cites the findings in a 2000 study written by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University and submitted it to the U.S. Trade Deficit Review Commission.

•  In 51 percent of union organizing drives, management made some sort of threat to close its operation down if the union won the election.
• Ninety-two percent of companies facing union elections made employees attend “captive audience meetings.”
• Sixty-seven percent had employees attend weekly “supervisor one-on-one” meetings.
• Seventy percent sent out “anti-union letters.”
• More than 50 percent showed “anti-union videos.” 

Says Frank:  

If American business was its own country, it would probably come in for [human rights] sanctions from the State Department. 

This business animus toward unions also threatens the future of the middle class, Frank declares: 

It’s more than the hypocrisy that should concern us, and it’s even more than the ongoing violation of people’s rights, human or civil. The destruction of the labor movement by tactics like these is a big part of the reason why wage-earners no longer rise as the economy grows, and why some day soon we will speak of the great middle-class nation in the past tense. 

Well said, Mr. Frank.

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