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Card Check: Seeing Unicorns and Rainbows in Hades

Submitted by Warner Todd Huston on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 05:19
in

The New York Times is attempting to spin gold from straw, telling us unicorns are real, expecting the Tooth Fairy to bring a windfall. At least, that is what it seems if we are to believe the Times' fantasy card check union story from April 20. You see, the Times believes that an overwhelming anti-union vote held via secret ballot is proof that card check is necessary.

This pretzel logic insists that the employer in question was so underhanded that even a secret ballot was corrupted by the efforts by the employer to scare off employees from supporting the union. But, here is the thing that makes no sense: if the ballot is secret, since no employee's name was connected to the vote, and if the employer was that mean to the workers, WHY did they still vote against the union?

Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com had the most logical take on the outcome of the vote and employer's moves to undermine the union.

What lesson are we to take from this story? Is it that management intimidated the nurses so badly that they somehow forced the nurses to vote against unionization in secret, even though they had publicly signed cards supporting the organizing effort? Does that make any sense at all? The obvious explanation is that the act of getting signed cards does not accurately reflect the wishes of the workers, and that any intimidation that occurred would have impacted the card-check process -- where people are public about their positions -- rather than in the secret ballot that followed.

Spot on. Rather than a better reflection of what workers want, we will see card check forcing unions on employees that don't want the union even IF they harbor some hard feelings against the employer.

Why are unions so headstrong on denying the workers the right to chose for themselves in the proper, traditionally democratic way? It can only be that unions are more interested in power than in the worker's needs. And the card check feature of the woefully misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will lead them to that end.

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Comments

Now hold on there...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 11:06.

...I just started reading the The New York Times' article you kindly provided as your source material when I ran across this little bit of perhaps enlightening information conveniently left out of your post:

"Organized labor points to the fight at Norton Audubon Hospital as proof that America’s labor laws need to be overhauled: judges ruled that management had prevailed by illegally intimidating and firing nurses."

So the fact as near as our -- yours and mine -- judicial system could determine was that the company ILLEGALLY intimidated the nurses into voting against the union by firing some of them.

 The article goes on to pour salt into the wound by adding the company's Orwellian take on their own ILLEGAL actions: 

"Management says the current process is fairer because workers are able to hear arguments from the union and management. Moreover, business leaders say, secret-ballot elections are more trustworthy than card check because union organizers can bully workers into signing pro-union cards.

 “Given the deceitful tactics unions employ when trying to get nurses to sign these cards, this is dangerous legislation that should not be enacted,” Stephen A. Williams, president of the hospital’s parent, the nonprofit corporation Norton Healthcare, wrote to the nurses in March.

The article goes on to substantiate all of the ILLEGAL actions taken by the company against its own employees in their effort to intimidate them into voting against unionization.

Mr. Huston, as you correctly point out, this article underscores the need for Card-Check just to create a level playing field against corporate malfeasance.  God help us. I am beginning to see just how far our party has been overtaken by the corporate culture if Mr. Huston is any example of our party's political stock.

ex animo

davidfarrar

ps: I know, Mr. Huston; the judges and all of the members of the NLRB are commie, radicals, is the only reason this company's actions was adjudicated unfairly to be ILLEGAL. After all, this company was only trying to deny their employees the rights we, as Republicans, are supposed to be protecting according to our own political platform.

I think Warner Todd Huston needs to go.

Submitted by thirdeblue on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 18:35.

He can play in the sand with the other clowns over at Red State.  I am sick and tired of conservatives and bullshit.  There may be a legitimate argument over the Card Check legislation, but this joker is not the one to be making it.

Yes, "thirdblue", he is pretty tiring.

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 19:58.

He is such a demagogue, I am beginning to wonder if he isn't a "liberal" plant, a counter-poster, bent on denigrating Republican conservatism by pushing it to its extreme. But then I think, Nah, that would take real intelligence.  Besides, one should never attribute to malice what ignorance can explain.

ex animo

davidfarrar

I don't think he's a plant. 

Submitted by acinphx on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 20:08.

I don't think he's a plant.  He's a front page poster at RedState and any whiff of less than total conformity to the talking points/echo chamber thinking gets you banned from there in very short order.  They would have sniffed him out by now if he were a plant.  You're right --he's just a demagogue. 

 

Yes, but he goes way beyond mere conformity....

Submitted by davidfarrar on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 22:29.

...all the way to blind fanaticism. At that level, most have long ago lost the ability to laugh at  themselves when they repeat the lie over and over again.

ex animo

davidfarrar

With leftists

Submitted by Warner Todd Huston on Thu, 04/23/2009 - 22:39.

With leftists like the above posters so exercised against me, it pretty much shows me I'm on the right track!

Yes, Mr. Huston...

Submitted by davidfarrar on Fri, 04/24/2009 - 07:27.

...now why am I not surprised?

ex animo

davidfarrar