House Committee on Education and Labor
U.S. House of Representatives

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As Democrat leaders prepare for tomorrow’s introduction of legislation to end private voting rights in the workplace, Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee’s Senior Republican, today highlighted a double standard in the “card check” legislation that further underscores the real motives of the bill’s supporters.

The “Employee Free Choice Act” – contrary to the implication of its title – would kill workers’ rights to privacy in union organization elections and instead make their votes public through a card check system in which union bosses gather authorization cards purportedly signed by workers expressing their desire for the union to represent them.  Such card checks can strip workers of the right to choose – freely and privately – whether to unionize, while leaving them open to intimidation and having their votes made public.  However, McKeon noted, workers seeking to decertify a union generally must do so via a private ballot election - and Big Labor has passionately insisted that this be the case, calling it a “solemn” occasion, imperative to preserving “privacy and independence.” 

“If a card check is good enough for workers to organize a union in a workplace, it should be good enough to allow them to break ties with that same union if they are not satisfied with the way it’s representing them,” said McKeon.  “The fact that card check supporters are not even remotely consistent on this issue is proof that this so-called ‘workers rights’ bill has nothing to do with workers at all.  Rather, it has everything to do with Big Labor’s last, desperate gasp in the midst of dwindling union membership – even if that means making a worker’s personal vote public.” 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership last year dipped to 12 percent, continuing a decades-long downward trend.  Even though current law allows for unions to organize through either a federally-supervised private ballot election or a card check, proponents of the card check bill are widely-viewed as pushing for intimidation-prone card checks that make a workers’ personal vote completely public.  McKeon highlighted this as another example of hypocrisy on the part of card check supporters. 

“If card check proponents want to pass the straight-face test, they should at least make sure they’re consistent on card checks in the first place,” concluded McKeon.  “If, as expected, Democrat leaders – all of whom are elected through a constitutionally-protected private ballot themselves – introduce a card check bill tomorrow that allows union bosses to insist on private ballot decertification elections, it will be yet another in an ever-growing list of double standards.” 

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