Stacked System Democracy denied to workers. BY GORDON LAFER Adults spend most of their waking hours at work. We live in a democracy when we're asleep, but our constitutional rights mostly disappear when we get to our jobs. Nowhere is this problem more obvious than in the flawed and corrupt "election" process for enabling workers to choose whether they want to represent themselves through a union. Opinion surveys show that about 40 million American workers wish they had a union in their workplace. This desire is understandable since workers with unions make about 30 percent more than their counterparts in the same type of job. But the chances of these employees realizing their desire is very small because the "election" system is highly stacked against workers. Many assume union elections run the same way as elections for Congress. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. When employees want to form a union in their workplace, they must go through a process that none of the Founding Fathers would recognize as democratic. Instead, almost every aspect of workplace "elections" looks more like discredited practices of rogue regimes abroad. The starting point of any regular election is that both sides have equal access to the list of registered voters. But in a workplace election, while management can mail anti-union propaganda to workers for months, the union doesn't even get a list of who the workers are until a few weeks before the vote. If we had elections for Congress where one candidate had access to the voter rolls for years and the other gained access in October, none of us would call that a free and fair contest. Within the workplace, management is free to campaign against the union to every employee, every day, throughout the day; union organizers are completely banned from the workplace. Management can post anti-union newsletters and posters on bulletin boards and walls while enforcing a ban on pro-union notices. One of the most outrageous practices is also one of the most common: forcing employees to participate in mass anti-union campaign rallies. Under federal law, employers can require workers to attend anti-union rallies. Not only are pro-union employees not given equal time, but they can be forced to attend on condition that they not say anything; employees who speak up can be fired on the spot. Management can hold these forced meetings up to the day before the vote. In most union elections, supervisors are required to have repeated one-on-one confrontations with the individuals they oversee. The person who has the most direct control over workplace conditions tells subordinates how to think and act. The message is clear: If you ever want a raise or a day off to take your kid to a doctor, you better not support the union.   Even "election day" itself takes place in the workplace — typically decked out with anti-union propaganda — under the watchful eyes of managers. In 2003, former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman led a Republican Party delegation to observe elections in Cambodia. Whitman declared that the vote was not "free and fair," in part because government-affiliated "village chiefs [sat] outside polling stations and check[ed] off voters as they entered and exited, providing a palpable sense they were being monitored despite casting a secret ballot." Yet workers across the U.S. are subject to just this type of intimidation whenever they seek to establish a union. In 2002, the State Department condemned elections in the Ukraine. Among the problems cited were that employees were pressured to support the ruling party; university administrators told students how to vote; and the ruling party dominated the media while restricting the opposition's access to TV and billboards. Many of the tactics used to intimidate U.S. employees are legal. However, because federal labor law contains no possibility of punitive fines, prison, or any other type of sanction, employers also break the law at will. Last year, approximately 15,000 Americans were illegally fired, suspended or otherwise financially punished for trying to form a union. If federal elections were run with the same lawlessness as the workplace, the 2004 election would have seen 7.5 million Americans fired, demoted or fined for backing the "wrong" candidate. An election where one party gets preferred access to the voter list, dominates communications, forces all voters to attend its rallies, and fires voters for backing the opposition is undemocratic and un-American. Anyone who is serious about workplace democracy has to start by insisting that we have at least as high standards for American workers as we do for voters abroad. Gordon Lafer is a political scientist at the UO and is the author of Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards (2005).
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