In exchange for these contributions, are Congressional Democrats willing to through out the right of all workers to choose via secret ballot union or non-union leadership? It is not surprising to find that the public is in clear support of secret balloting. According to a 2006 survey by Opinion Research Corporation, 75 percent of Americans support secret ballots, and only 12 percent supported card check, with 13 percent of Americans undecided.
Card Check is the start of an uncompetitive onslaught on the American economy. Following the Employee Free Choice Act, look for Congress to expand prevailing wage laws, the legal guarantee to unions that you the taxpayer will pay more for government contracts than a comparable private sector project. Often these contracts are awarded through uncompetitive and no bid contracts and passed under ‘emergency’ legislation. Big city power politics, the dangerous mix of political machines and unions, is stepping up to the federal level.
While Card Check is an immediate threat, other side effects of pandering to unions for short term political support will be felt down the road. Politicians make expensive promises in election years for continued electoral support of public and private unions, and the public is left picking up the tab. A USA Today analysis calculated the unfunded liability of government pension obligations to state, local, and federal employees more than $27,500 per citizen. Private sector unions from the airlines, to steel, to the auto industry are already looking to federal government coffers to bail out unrealistic and unsustainable benefit packages.
Private sector union membership has dramatically declined over the past generation because our robust, highly mobile economy makes it easy for workers to defend their own economic interests. Unions have now become political and economic rent-seekers demanding special privileges at the expense of most workers and all taxpayers. Power corrupts, and nothing corrupts more than powerful special interests allied with big government.
Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, stressed that voluntary associations are preferable and more legitimate than compulsory institutions. Big unions are pushing Card Check along with an aggressive protectionist agenda at the expense of the rest of us. Reaping the benefits of this agenda will be union bureaucrats and Democratic Party coffers. The immediate casualty is worker freedom from coercion, but the long term economy will suffer from a lack of innovation, an inability to compete, and a high tax tax-big government political culture.