Over at National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg points out the tricky nature of the card check process:
For starters, the cards are written in ways that make “predatory lending” mortgages seem like paragons of full disclosure.
The National Right to Work website shows an example of such a card. In big, bold letters on top, it says “Request for Employees Representation Election.” But after you fill out the relevant info, there’s the small print, authorizing the Teamsters to “represent me in all negotiations of wages, hours and working conditions.”
In other words, in many cases, workers who think they’re just voting for an election are in fact voting for unionization. The unions make it as difficult as possible to do the former without also doing the latter. Check a card, find the king’s shilling.
Also, if the number of cards is over 30 percent but below 50 percent, there still isn’t an election unless the organizers – not the workers – want it.
As Mickey Kaus, a one-man blogging crusader against card check, wrote, “No individual worker will know if his signed card will provide the 31 percent plurality or the 51 percent majority. Only the organizers know this. You could sign the card intending to provoke an election and discover that you actually prevented an election. There’s no way for ordinary workers to reliably game the system in order to ‘choose’ a secret ballot.”
Translation: They’re not workers with a vote, they’re marks.
That sounds good for union organizers, not so much for everyone else involved. More here.