YET MORE NEWS FROM CANADA….Unions support card check legislation because they think it will make it easier to organize new industries. Business leaders dislike card check for the same reason. But what they say is that card check is bad because it allows union organizers to intimidate workers into signing cards. Now, business leaders are well-known for their tender sensibilities toward worker rights, but Jonathan Zasloff decided to check up on the intimidation story anyway:
For 50 years, from the 40’s to the 90’s. the province of Ontario had a card-check organizing system….So what was the record there?
I used advanced research techniques unknown to many reporters, and called up Harry Arthurs of York University, Canada’s pre-eminent labour law scholar. Arthurs literally wrote the book on this stuff. And I asked him: what does the evidence show?
Arthurs answered that in all of his research about labour law complaints under card check, he could not find a single case where the employer complained of a union intimidating workers to unionize when they didn’t want to.
That’s right: zero. Zilch. Nada. Efes. Rien.
….This isn’t some obscure jurisdiction. It’s Ontario, the largest and richest province in the country. 50 years. A half a century. Zero.
Look: unions aren’t perfect. Nothing is perfect. The financial industry, just to pick an example out of my hat, is obviously wildly imperfect, but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of the private financial industry. It just means we should regulate it to avoid some of its worst pathologies.
Ditto for unions. If anyone has a better mechanism for giving workers more bargaining clout and therefore higher wages, I’m all ears. Anyone who thinks collective bargaining is a good idea but believes we ought to reform the Wagner Act, I’ll listen to them too. But the evidence of the past 30 years makes it pretty clear that productivity growth and improved education aren’t nearly enough on their own to keep median wages growing. Neither is unionization, for that matter. But at least it pushes in the right direction. If card check helps that along, I’m all for it.
