Filed under: Card Check, Unions / Labor | Tags: Card Check, efca, employee free choice act, unions
If you’re at all interested in the card check / EFCA debate, you should check out this must-see video over at the Heritage Foundation’s Insider Online site.
In the video, former union organizer Rian Wathen exposes some of the secret tricks that he and his colleagues used to get workers to sign cards in support of unionization. Interestingly, Wathen goes beyond the intimidation line we’ve heard a lot about; in the video he also explains how the one mandatory sentence calling for unionization can be hidden or camouflaged in the middle of a lot of other unrelated and innocuous text:
“The card can have any language on it, as long as it has one line on it, which is the suggested language from the National Labor Relations Board that says ‘I hereby authorize what ever the union is to represent me for the purposes of collective bargaining.”
Wathen goes on to display a creative unionization card that SEIU has been using in California:
“It’s a color pamphlet, and it has real nice pictures on the front, and it has a bunch of fluff about SEIU and how you’re going to get better wages and benefits and all this wonderful stuff. Buried in the middle of the paragraph on that front is the line about how you authorize SEIU to represent you for purposes of collective bargaining… But most interestingly about this card, is the inside of the card – it’s just a line of signatures – put your name, put your address, put your phone number. I don’t see anything on that page on the inside of the pamphlet that says ‘I authorize SEIU to represent me for the purposes of collective bargaining. So I have this pamphlet, I’m a union organizer, I hold a meeting at the local pizza joint where I’m buying pizza and beer, and I lay this down on the table like this and say, “Here… sign in here on our sign-in sheet. Right? Not against the law. This is the card that they’re using right now in California.”
Wathen describes several other methods of manipulation — check out the entire video here.
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