Does Canadian labor policy have anything to teach the United States as Congress moves toward consideration of card check legislation? In an article in Forbes.com, ABC president John Endean looks at the use of card check in Canada. The Forbes.com piece can be accessed here.
An expanded version of this essay has been published by the Manhattan Institute. That longer version is available here.
Professor Bainbridge makes some excellent points about Wal-Mart’s new romance with the prospect of an employer “pay or play” mandate for health care. In so doing, he touches upon Wal-Mart’s longstanding status as a target for labor organization and its apparent hope that by endorsing “pay or play” the company can stave off the unions.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing at all untypical about this. Businesses commonly employ lobbying strategies that embrace for their own parochial purposes policies not in the general business interest.
One of the reasons typically advanced for card check legislation — which would, among other things, make it possible to organize a company without a secret ballot election by relevant workers – is that secret ballot elections are somehow biased against unionization.
The data belie this. In the first half of 2008, the uni0n win rate in private sector organizing elections was 66.8 percent, according to the National Labor Relations Board. This win rate has been tracking upward, with one exception, for the last five years. In 2003 the union win rate was 58.3 percent; in 2004, 58.6 percent; in 2005, 61.3 percent; in 2006, 61.4 percent; and in 2007, 60.5 percent.
Not bad.