1115.org

Since the party of no truth opposes the Employee Free Choice Act (the so-called card check bill), it has been busy spreading various untruths about the bill. One of these was the canard that the card check provision does away with secret ballots.

Since the party of no truth has well-developed institutional expertise in the effective propagation of untruths, it is able to get all sorts of people who ought to know better to believe many of its untruths. And of all the different sorts of people whom it dearly loves to bamboozle, journalists (and people in the “news” business to whom it would be an untruth to apply the word journalist) rank very near the top.

A key untruth about the Employee Free Choice Act that the Republicans have been able to effectively propagate among the media is “the premise that card-check leads to union intimidation without question”.

So now there’s a comprehensive study by the University of Illinois-Chicago which “basically obliterates that argument”.

Since 2003, Illinois labor law has allowed public sector workers in municipal, county, state, and educational institutions to organize a union via a majority sign-up certification process (PDF). By submitting authorization cards, petitions, or any other evidence that demonstrates that a majority of the employees wish to bargain collectively with a union, the Illinois Labor Relations Board (ILRB) or the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (in the case of teachers) can certify a bargaining unit without requiring a full workplace election. Petitions may be defeated if “clear and convincing evidence” is presented showing that the cards were obtained by “fraud or coercion.” (In these situations, the boards generally order an election.)

Thanks to Freedom of Information requests and follow-up interviews with a number of board agents, Bob Bruno, co-director of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Labor Education Program, got his hands on all of the case data for fiscal years 2003-2009. His findings are astonishing.

In the past six years, 21,197 public sector workers from a wide variety of industries have organized under the new guidelines, with the boards certifying 799 units. While just under 300 petitions were dismissed because the union failed to achieve majority support, literally zero petitions were thrown out because of labor coercion.

Bruno’s study concludes that:

…the most dramatic outcome of the provision’s administration is the total absence of any employee or union abuse. In over 1,000 cases there is only one allegation of union coercion or fraud to compel or induce workers to sign authorizations. The ILRB found the complaint to be meritless.

Shall we be “hope springs eternal” kind of people and start expecting the media to immediately stop pushing the union intimidation meme?

(In case the title of the post rang a bell, but not a very loud one, think Grace Slick.)