Secret ballot under fire for American workers

Voter privacy is a fundamental human right. Americans know this in theirheart and soul. We take it for granted. The standard television image onelection days is of voters –from presidential candidates to regularcitizens–stepping inside a voter booth and closing the curtain so they canvote privately. Voter privacy is as American as the Stars and Stripes.
Incredibly, legislation is advancing in Congress that would obliteratevoter privacy in American workplaces because that basic human right has beenconstrued by some in Washington to collide with their ambition of expandedunionism.
The legislation would institute a “card-check” system, stripping workers oftheir longstanding right to vote privately in union elections, turning theclock back 60 years to a failed process that was rife with widespreadintimidation of workers. Currently, if 30 percent of a workplace petitions forunion representation, then the National Labor Relations Board supervises anelection and the determination is made by the majority of workplace voters,having cast their votes privately.
This democratic process has worked well for American workers. But there areWashington power-brokers who feel their interests would be better served byending the workers’ right to voter privacy. Unionization has shrunk in thepast 50 years, from a high of 35 percent of the private sector workforce inthe 1950s to less than 8 percent today. Card-check proponents believe thatsupplanting voter privacy with signature cards would reverse unions’ downwardtrend.
With this undercutting of voter privacy, American workers would have noprotection from efforts to get them to sign the union cards. One does not needa fertile imagination to anticipate the pressure and coercion that could occurwhen American workers no longer had the protection of private voting inunionization elections. Yet, more than 200 members of the House ofRepresentatives have co-sponsored the card-check bill to strip workers of theright to privacy in choosing whether to be unionized.
Union leaders need to look at ways of building up their organizations thatdon’t tear down the fundamental democratic right of American workers to casttheir votes on the subject, in private.
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Elaine L. Chao is the U.S. secretary of labor.