Missouri Moves to Make Secret Ballot Required by Law

So, the question remains, can a state law supersede a federal law?

That would be no.

Also, under EFCA, if 30% of the workers want a secret ballot, they get it.

Next?

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof ... shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

Pro labor people point out the adavantages employers have in defeating union organizing drives.  They have the right to require workers to attend long "information" sessions run by management.  The so called "secret ballot elections are held at the workplace under employer observation.

They sometimes offer a compromise: secret ballots at a neutral location unobserved by the employer.  Would you accept that?

I've had some recent experience with union organizing campaigns.  My place of employment was organized in 2003 and we are now a closed union shop.  Here is how the campaign actually took place.  The preliminary work to get the workplace unionized - contacting professional union organizers, assessing support, creating the structure of a local union - all took place in secret among a small group of very committed people.  It started a full 2 years before the actual public campaign took place.  The only reason there was any public campaign at all was because there had to be a secret ballot election.  After all if your goal is to start a union at any cost why would you make your intentions publicly known?  All that does is tip off your employer to what's going on.  So if you didn't have to wage a public campaign, all you'd have to do is contact enough of your coworkers, in private, secretly, until you have 50%+1 support.  And especially in smaller workplaces, you have a pretty good idea ahead of time who is likely to support you and who is not, so you just ignore those in the latter category.  And in your surreptitious campaign to persuade people, you don't have to provide accurate information; throw out all the wild and crazy claims that you want, as long as they are at least a little bit believable.  For instance, in my workplace example, the union organizers made claims that management assigned merit bonuses on the basis of personal friendship rather than on actual merit, and that an organized workplace would make it all "fairer".  (Turned out that what they meant by "fairer" was "eliminate merit bonuses entirely", but that's another story.)  This claim sounds believable especially if you already have a cynical view towards management to begin with.  However it was only through the public campaign that this claim was disproved, when management published the actual statistics of who got merit bonuses - surprise surprise, the union organizers cherry-picked their facts to support their agenda.  This is the kind of abuse that WILL take place if EFCA becomes law.

So it's really really important to have a public campaign to decide whether or not to have a unionized workplace because it is only through a public campaign that both sides' claims can be evaluated, openly, by the workers themselves, and both sides have the opportunity to respond to inaccurate claims leveled by the other side.  If there's no public campaign then the union organizers will run the whole thing in secret.  It's the exact same rationale for why we have public campaigns to decide who's going to be president or senator or city dogcatcher or whatever.

We all know how the cards will be signed. Incessant phone calls to the families of non-signers, "informational" visits in the driveway when you get home; peer pressure in the parking lot after the end of the shift.

The secret ballot exists for a purpose. That purpose is a hindrance to expanding the supply of dues paying members. So, screw privacy rights. Screw democracy. We need the dues money.