Posted on 02/18/2014 4:42:56 PM PST by jazusamo
Labor: Union bosses have contended for some time that a secret ballot isn't needed to unionize a workplace. All that's needed, they said, was employees' signatures on cards. But Chattanooga proved them wrong.
For months the United Auto Workers have said a majority of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee had signed cards expressing their interest in unionizing. Why bother with a secret ballot when the workers had already spoken through the "card check" approval process?
Before a much-anticipated and widely followed union-representation vote held last week, the AP reported that Gary Casteel, Tennessee-based regional director for the UAW, was saying a "solid majority" of workers had signed cards favoring certification. Reuters reported a similar story, with UAW President Bob King insisting, "Yes, we have a majority."
As it turned out, the union's claim of majority support was wrong. Workers at the Chattanooga plant used secret ballots to reject union representation 53-47.
The vote showed two things. One, unions continue to lose power and influence they are relics in today's private-sector workplace. UAW membership is down 75% since the late 1980 while only 6.7% of the entire private-sector workforce belongs to unions.
In Chattanooga, the UAW couldn't even win an election when the employer was on its side. It had a built-in advantage with Volkswagen trying to trap its employees in a German-style works council, and it still failed.
Two, the secret ballot is important and card check is dangerous. Card check is an idea that's been around a while. Under the practice, a company can, if it wishes, recognize a union when a majority of employees voluntarily sign cards that designate that union to represent them.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
The defeat in Chattanooga could prove to be the final nail in the coffin of this moribund organization.
Let it be so. When a union joins the company, or vice versa, to screw the workers it's gone way too far.
I’m sure the NLRB would like to, it’ll be interesting to see just what they do or try to do.
Bump!
I can certainly defend their existence during said time, because they were NEEDED.
Rotten capitalist pigs would let a worker have his arm sawed off, and they didn't care.
They'd get another cog in the mill take his place.
But there is literally NO place for unions now.
Workmans comp, OSHA, and all sorts of regulations have made these dinosaur unions obsolete.
And there is REALLY no place for "public sector" unions.
They work directly with democrat politicians to maximize their power and screw everyone else, particularly taxpayers along the way.
I couldn’t agree more on both private and public unions, they rip off employees.
I do believe employees should have the right to have a SMALL group that will represent them and their rights under the law for a SMALL monthly fee that’s used strictly for that with absolutely no political affiliations.
The Dems are in charge of counting the votes from the touch screen voting machines. A soros company does the counting and once the machines are downloaded there is no recourse. They are wiped clean. Those machines were designed to be fraudulent, I think. The count is what the counting agency says it is and no one can show otherwise. Individual non touch screen machines are evidently easy to hack as shown by many machines that showed Democrat candidates when Republican names were put in in the last election. Republicans hae no history of tinkering with the machines. Democrats do it as SOP. I suspect the next elections are already configured.
original buckeye,
Do you think it might be that they are registering people through every mechanism possible, (ie. Acorn, it’s new names, high school registration, drivers lic enrollment, SNAP, Obamacare, et al....) then actually voting for all of them during mail in or early voting? Just a hunch.....
You might want to re-word your post.
The story that’s barely been told is that VW supported the UAW. The reason is that VW’s corporate bylaws require plant employees to be organized under workers’ councils, as they are in Germany.
However, US federal laws REQUIRE that such councils operate under the auspices of a labor union. So, under VW’s own bylaws, any VW plant in the US MUST become unionized.
I guess this means that Volkswagen can’t locate plants in right-to-work states.
pps. “It” meaning the secret vote, of course.
It's a good site to subscribe to. You have to filter out the "Capitalism is dying" mantra they constantly espouse (they're STILL defending Trotsky fer Crissakes), but they do bring out a lot of these union-management sweetheart deals.
Same with some of their foreign reporting, where, despite their spin, they do present some interesting insights that no one else does.
Yes.
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