There's no such thing as a "secret ballot" in a union election. By the time a union campaign is over -- after months of drawn-out intimidation by the employer -- everyone, especially the boss, knows precisely which way every worker is voting. They have professional consultants who make a lot of money doing just this kind of thing. I have talked to union organizers who later got ahold of the boss consultants' assessments of workers in one union campaign or another, and their judgments of which way each worker would vote were identical to the judgments of the union organizers. The notion of the "secret ballot" is a ruse. What the employers want is a guarantee that they can have all of those months to lay on the intimidation to keep workers from having a union.
Workers have to sign authorization cards (which is really a public statement of their intent to join the union) if they want to file for a union election in the first place -- legally, they can file at 30%, but most unions now don't even bother to file until the 60-70% range because of the inevitable boss intimidation that thins the ranks of union supporters. The NLRB election process is preposterous, and that workers win at all in these situations is nothing short of miraculous. If a majority of workers sign union cards, they've already publicly stated their intent, and there's no need to have an "election" where the boss is permitted to cajole and threaten people.
Currently, employers are permitted under the law to recognize unions through this card-check process. The Republican bill would make the NLRB process mandatory, not even allowing employers to recognize a union formed by a stated majority of their workers without an "election."
- - - - - - - - - - John Lacny http://www.johnlacny.com
Tell no lies, claim no easy victories