Choose your weapon: cards or ballots?
It has become the central question in union organizing fights across the country: Will the employer recognize a union after a majority of its workers sign union cards? Or will the employer insist that its workers cast secret ballots in federally supervised elections?
These questions -- of paper and power -- move from the workplace to Congress this week, when the House is scheduled to cast the first vote in what could be a years-long legislative battle between the country's largest labor unions and most powerful business lobbies.
The stakes: deciding the manner in which Americans join unions.
The proposed Employee Free Choice Act would take from employers the right to decide whether to accept the signing of cards -- generally called "card check" -- or demand an election. Instead, a workplace could unionize if labor persuaded a majority of employees to sign cards -- without an election of all employees.
"We're not free to organize the way we want to organize," said Glendale Hilton bartender Angela Reid, who has been active in union organizing at the hotel.
"We don't want to do an election. We want to vote the way we want to -- give our cards back to our organizers and vote that way."
Reversed roles
For both sides, the battle represents something of a role reversal and offers a window on the important but odd details of labor law.
Unions and their political allies, which for 70 years championed the secret ballot for unionizing workers, are all but abandoning the election process, arguing that aggressive anti-union tactics by businesses make such elections too difficult and costly.
And business leaders, generally hostile to any government intervention in their companies, are preparing to spend millions to defend federal supervision of elections in which workers choose whether to unionize.
Without a vote, said Joe Herman, a lawyer who has long represented employers, "employees would lose their free choice on whether or not to become unionized."
"It's incredible verbal jujitsu to call this Employee Free Choice," Herman said. "It's Orwellian."
The House is expected to approve the legislation as soon as Thursday, but Senate prospects are less certain.
Even if the bill passes Congress, President Bush has pledged to veto it.
Labor leaders expect defeat this year but say theirs is a years-long strategy, designed to educate the public on the problems of secret ballots.
