Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_dux
ace..I know its not always about management being intimidating......just far more often than employee representatives using intimidation tactics, unless you have data that would suggest otherwise.
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I am not sure how old you are or what your background is, so you may not be aware of the actual practices of some unions from about 1960 until today. The type of data that you may be looking for does not get tracked based on what I know. But for the record I am 48 years old, my father, uncles, and men in my neighborhood were all union members. I was a union member during some brief times when I had summer jobs. I was forced to join even though I knew I was going back to school at the end of the summer and could have used the union dues for books or food (at the end of the school year things would get tight). First, when my father moved from the south to Illinois as a young man, there were unions who would not accept him due to his race regardless of his ability. There were union who would stop charitable construction work being done by non-union people. With UAW there was often a strategy of picking an employer for a strike so that other UAW workers could continue to work. So you often had a small number of families carrying the burden for the UAW as a whole. This strategy was not by choice of the individual, if a man could not make it - he dared not cross the picket line. The irony is that many of these men were forced to take non-union part-time work else where. For guys near retirement, they often never made up for the money and benefits lost.
Women where not allowed to join many unions.
Union cards in some unions where distributed on a cronyism basis, if you dad was in - you were going to get in.
When I lived in Southern California there was a grocers union strike. I had a friend whose son accept a job at a store during the strike, this was maybe 2004 or 2005. His vehicle was vandalized one night and lost his job after the strike.
All of this is anecdotal and is certainly subject to the observation that not all unions are like the above or whatever comments follow, but it is clear in my mind that the decision to join a union should be a private choice free of intimidation. No person should be forced to take a union vote publicly. No person should be forced to strike or face intimidation. I am surprised that liberals are o.k. with intimidation tactics and are not willing to fight for the victims of unionization bullying tactics.
Perhaps compromise is in order - perhaps in exchange for this "free choice", there is real consequence for intimidation.
There is NO forced non-secret ballot....the EFCA offers a CHOICE among the employees for a card check OR a secret ballot based on the expressed wishes of the majority of workers.[/QUOTE]