-By Warner Todd Huston
There will be dark days ahead for American business and the economy if Barack Obama becomes the president. Especially if his coattails brings an avalanche of Democrats into Congress. All because the first order of business for the next Congress will be passage of the “card check” ideas that unions have been pushing for since 2003. Once Obama and his cadre of anti-business, anti-democracy associates get in place, the card check idea will be good as gold. And the safety of prospective union members everywhere will be endangered.
Deceivingly called the “Employee Free Choice Act,” it is an effort by unions to allow them to use intimidation to force new union voters to agree to union organization and representation. David Weigel of Reason Magazine has a short explanation in the current issue.
What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards.
In other words, the secret vote will be taken away from prospective union members. This means, if an employee votes against agreeing to unionize, his no vote will be instantly obvious to everyone with whom he works. This also means that union thugs will be able to know exactly who stands against them. This opens the employee up to harassment by union thugs who want to push through unions because they will know the identity of every single worker that voted against them.
Now, secret balloting, the security of a vote known only to the voter, is the single most important aspect of a free, democratic electoral system. And here we have unions proving that they don’t care a whit about democracy and want to be able to rely solely on coercion and thuggery to force their way into businesses that might very well be filled with workers who don’t want to be unionized.
But, with the card check system in place, workers could easily find themselves voting for a union they don’t want because of the pressure of their vote being openly known by everyone.
So, what we have here is a simple fact: unions hate democracy.
And if Obama becomes president, we will see LESS democracy in this country.
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston