TLMI Position Statement on EFCA

The Tag & Label Manufacturers Institute (TLMI) Position Statement on The Employee Free Choice Act (also known as “Card Check”)

For decades, unions have been a declining force in the workplace. Fifty years ago, 35 percent of all workers belonged to unions. Now just 7.5 percent in the private sector do. This trend is partly due to shifts in the makeup of our economy and partly due to rising standards of living and changing employee attitudes.

Union membership has not declined because rules governing recognition of a union as the bargaining agent for employees are stacked against organized labor. Current rules allow employers to request a secret ballot election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, and unions won 67 percent of the elections in the first half of 2008. Organized labor, through the “Employee Free Choice Act” (better known as “EFCA” or simply “Card Check”) wants to improve its fortunes by changing fair existing rules.

The TLMI opposes the Employee Free Choice Act because:
1. Under Card Check, a union could simply collect authorization cards signed by a majority of employees in a bargaining unit to be recognized as the representative of all the employees in that unit. This process would eliminate the secret ballot election, where employees can privately express preferences and prevent anyone, including co-workers, union organizers or company officials, from finding out how they voted. Card Check is not “free choice”—choices made without privacy would make workers more vulnerable to coercion and intimidation. To take away the prized American value of secret ballots in order to skew the results in favor of one side would be a huge mistake.

Secret ballots are good for democracies; they should be good for union elections as well.

2. Card Check would allow a federal arbitrator to write the labor agreement defining every detail about how employees will work for two years if the parties have not reached agreement within 120 days—a very short time for negotiating first contracts. This provides an incentive for union negotiators to make sure the process lasts long enough to get into arbitration and destroys incentives to negotiate in good faith. It would also deprive employees of their opportunity to ratify their first contract—it would be imposed on all with no ability for either employers or employees to challenge it.

One outside individual’s view should not determine whether a business remains viable.

3. The Employee Free Choice Act also dramatically increases penalties on employers for certain violations of the National Labor Relations Act without increasing any penalties on unions for violations that they might commit. Fair penalties cannot be one-sided.

Balance is essential to fairness; NLRA objectives cannot be achieved without fairness.

The TLMI Board of Directors
March 10, 2009