The most pungent argument against the Employee Free Choice Act, or "card check," informs workers that the legislation would take away secret ballot elections AND warns them that union bosses could use coercion to collect the "yes" cards. The moment that argument reaches critical mass, the thinking goes, workers will reject card check. Getting over the "secret ballot" and "coercion" humps are tough. But labor officials have reason to believe that the poisonous economic atmosphere can influence the debate as much as the complex particulars of the bills. I've obtained internal polling from the AFL-CIO's contract surveyist, Peter Hart, which presents the anti-secret ballot and coercion arguments alongside the standard case for EFCA.
I am going to read you two statements about this legislation, and please tell me which one you agree with more.
Supporters say that the system is broken and working people are struggling to make ends meet today, and the middle class is being squeezed. One way to help average people get their fair share is to let them bargain with their employers for better wages and benefits. Workers in unions earn twenty-eight percent higher wages on average, are sixty-two percent more likely to have employer health coverage, and four times as likely to have a pension. It's time our economy worked for everyone again.
Opponents say that this legislation is a bad idea because it would abolish the secret ballot elections now held to determine union representation. This legislation would force more workers into unions, because union bosses can use coercion or deception to collect authorization cards. And with our economy already weak, we don't need laws that give more power to the unions that wrecked the American auto industry.
According to Hart, a respected Democratic pollster, 54% of those responding to those two arguments read in random order support the card check principles, compared to just 35% who oppose them.
Before I read too much into this, I'd want to see precisely how Hart identifies himself and his firm... and whether previous questions favorably predispose the respondent to support card check. Still, the questions themselves seem fair enough. I'd love to see a non-partisan pollster ask the same ones.
I'm also skeptical of how Gallup worded their latest poll. "Generally speaking," 53% of Americans support legislation to make it easier for unions to organize. That's accounted for by the above-mentioned atmospherics.
But "card check" isn't a "general" piece of legislation, as the AFL-CIO's own internal message testing points out.
Unfortunately for the union hierarchy, the actual economic facts do not fit with Peter Hart's spin on what the economic impact of mandatory "card checks" would be.
Once interstate differences in cost of living are taken into account, using an index created by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center (which has no "card check" agenda whatsoever), both per capita disposable incomes (as reported by the Commerce Department) and average weekly earnings (wages and salaries, as reported by the Bureau of National Affairs) turn out to be significantly lower in the most heavily unionized states than they are in the least unionized states.
In 2007, the aggregate cost of living-adjusted disposable income for the 10 states with the lowest share of private-sector workers under "exclusive" union bargaining arrangements was roughly $33,500, compared to a little less than $29,700 for the 10 states with the highest share of private-sector unionized workers.
That same year, cost of living-adjusted weekly earnings in the 10 states with the highest share of private-sector employees subject to union "exclusive" bargaining were $713, $66 less than the average in the 10 states with the lowest share of private-sector employees under Organized Labor control.
Contrary to Peter Hart's spin, it will be pretty hard for Organized Labor to argue that increasing the share of workers who are unionized will raise workers' purchasing power, when the states that are most heavily unionized now have below average cost of living-adjusted incomes and earnings!
Stan Greer
National Institute for Labor Relations Research
National Right to Work Committee
Isn't the proper comparison, as set forth in the poll question, between unionized workers and non-unionized workers, and not "heavily unionized states" and "non heavily unionized states"? If we measure by states, then we could miss a statistic that would show, for example, that unionized workers in the least unionized states make more than their non-unionized fellow citizens (I don't know if this is true or not, just pointing out the dilemma). There may be other factors which lead unionized states to have lower average wages; for example, a state like West Virginia is considered heavily unionized but has few economic advantages beyond coal deposits. In addition, the wages in those states might be even lower if they were not unionized. If the argument instead is that heavy unionization leads to lower wages for everyone, then perhaps states are a proper measuring unit, but it is difficult to test this theory without comparing to a theoretical 100% unionized America. Otherwise, companies could simply locate in states without union protections (as they probably do, which could also be a factor in this disparity). Then we get into the question of whether a more highly unionized America would drive these companies overseas. Anyway, enough rambling, but my main point is that comparing unionized workers to non-unionized workers seems like a more focused analysis than using entire states.
By the standards proponents of the "card check" bill themselves have set, the legitimate comparison is how to earnings (and also incomes) fare overall, not just how unionized employees' incomes fare.
Proponents of the "card check" legislation claim it will help raise the earnings of all employees, not just unionized employees, by increasing the share of employees who are unionized. But the record, as I explained above, shows that real, spendable earnings are lower than average in the most heavily unionized states, and lower than in the least unionized states, specifically.
At any rate, it is far from clear how much, if at all, unionization benefits unionized workers as a group, and certainly many individual unionized workers are harmed as a consequence of being forced to accept a union as their "exclusive" bargaining agent.
According to the Bureau of National Affairs, in 2007 the average hourly wage for nonunion manufacturing workers was $21.39 an hour, a bit higher than the $20.70 an hour average for unionized workers. In the wholesale and retail trade area, unionized workers' wages were only marginally higher than nonunion workers' wages, $15.84 an hour vs. $15.51. When you take into account the fact that the unionized retail workers are disproportionately located in high cost of living states, it's doubtful they have any earnings advantage at all. Probably, their real purchasing power is lower than that of nonunion retail workers as a group.
Furthermore, as James Sherk of the Heritage Foundation noted in a recent study, years of research show that unionized workers are far less likely to get promoted than are union-free workers.
There are a variety of reasons why many workers may legitimately believe they are worse off because they are under an "exclusive" union contract. And public policy already favors "exclusive" union bargaining, as the National Labor Relations Act explicitly acknowledges. Given the evidence that the prevalence of such unionism hurts economic growth overall, and many, many workers as well, there is no reason to give a new boost to "exclusive" union bargaining by enacting the "card check" bill.
Mr. Greer, I just wanted to thank you for putting your affiliation up front and responding to my comment in a substantive way. While my own profession will never be unionized, I am still learning about the issue, and it is rare to find comments on the Internet that go beyond conclusory statements and personal invective. Maybe I should thank Marc as well for running a good ship!
What gets me about the whole Obama/Democrat approach is that they think that unionization will enrich the middle class while not affecting silly little things like unemployment, inflation, outsourcing and so on. They're confusing the monopoly capitalism we enjoyed in the 1950s while other nations had to reindustrialize with today's globalized economy. Yeah, unions worked just fine back then, but as soon as Japan and Germany caught up to speed, both unions and the American industries they invaded started a swift downward spiral, as evidenced by the 1970s cars in America and the bankrupt state of our auto industry in 2009. Sure, unionize Wal-Mar and get 20 percent pay raises, matched swiftly by 20 percent staff reductions. Of course, the liberals got a plan for those 20 percent as well, and it's called "Support for the Vulnerable" (see recovery.gov), or more accurately, the resurrection of welfare as we hated it.