The decision, taken in a 3-2 vote by the five-member national labor board, indicates that the NLRB may overturn this long-standing practice. The “card-check recognition” enables workers to bypass the lengthy election process set by the NLRB, which often takes years. Its elimination would be an additional tool for the bosses to undermine the right of workers to organize unions, many in the labor movement say.

“In cases where a ballot is necessary, employers can delay elections and bargaining for up to five years,” said Larry Cohen, vice president of the Communications Workers of America, at a May 29 meeting in Washington, D.C., the union reported.

A Cornell University study found that 75 percent of employers hire anti-union “consultants” to help them fight organizing drives, and 92 percent of the bosses require mandatory employee attendance at meetings where they present their anti-union message, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported June 12.

A decision by the NLRB against “card-check” agreements would also allow bosses to seek immediate decertification, forcing workers at a newly unionized site to return to the election process rather than bargain for a contract. Current board policy bars a decertification election until a “reasonable period of time,” at least a year, to allow bargaining on a contract.

The union officialdom has largely relied on “card-checking” agreements to slow down the steady decline in the number of unionized workers as a substitute for mobilizing the entire labor movement to back union-organizing efforts. Overall union membership in the United States has dropped from 20 percent in 1983 to 13 percent last year.

At the same time, workers in many cases have used “card-checking” as a speedier process to organize a union. The AFL-CIO reports that as many as 550,000 new union members have been won this way in recent years.

The NLRB decided to review the card-checking procedure based on complaints in three cases that had been dismissed by regional labor boards. Earlier this year, the NLRB agreed to hear a complaint about the use of card-check at Metaldyne Corp., an auto parts supplier, in Plymouth, Michigan. In June it combined that with a similar complaint at the Upper Sandusky plant of Dana Corp., where a majority of workers had signed cards for representation by the United Auto Workers. The third case involves workers who sought to be represented by the United Steelworkers of America at a Cequent Towing Products plant in Goshen, Indiana.

In all three cases, the employers had agreed to recognize the respective unions without a union election. The challenges were brought by anti-union employees organized and represented by the Springfield, Virginia-based National Right to Work Legal Foundation, a group that opposes what it calls “compulsory unionism.” The plaintiffs have asked the NLRB to authorize decertification elections.

In another antilabor ruling, the labor board decided in early June that workers in a nonunion workplace are not entitled to have a co-worker accompany them when they are called into a meeting with the bosses. The NLRB recognizes this right for unionized workers, but employers violate it widely in many union shops.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers’ right to organize  
 
 
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