Is it that they’re all inherently crazed liberals?

Is it that the GOP has to be bad for poor people?

Is it that the GOP has to be bad for blacks?

All of your suggestions would benefit the Democratic Party while the GOP rejects DC voters. Give the land to virginia and maryland and those states get more Democratic voters. Any other state they vote in gets more Democratic voters. Make it a state and you get another Democratic state.

As long as the GOP abandons these people then any approach to letting them vote is bad for the GOP. You object to the one that’s on the table because it’s bad for the GOP, but so are all the others. The only thing that makes them better for you is that they aren’t actually being considered.

I don’t expect them to be pursued, because none of them provide that optimal result of more Democratic votes in Congress, cast by people who are utterly dependent on the good will of Congress.

Employers can and do force employees to attend anti-union meetings. It’s not just being paid to attend – people are ordered to attend by their bosses, and can be disciplined or fired for insubordination if they don’t.

I have no power over the person I’m talking to. I can’t fire them, I can’t discipline them, I can’t reassign them, I can’t force them to talk to me. The boss does have that power. In that circumstance, why would I try to use violence and intimidation against someone whose confidence, trust, and support I’m trying to win? Actual intimidation from union organizers is extremely, extremely rare because it’s a toxic strategy – even if you get that person to sign a card, you aren’t going to get them to walk a picket line or phonebank or go to a membership meeting or anything like that; when the word gets out and it inevitably will, you’ll have destroyed all possibility of building a rapport with workers and any idea that the union is an institution that’s on their side. Not to say that it doesn’t happen ever, or that it has never happened, but it’s a dead-end strategy that only the most depraved individual would employ and any sane institution would condone. You’d more or less have to assume that unions were kamikaze institutions to think that they would embrace this as a major tool, given the hue blowback they would face and the damage to their interests.

However, just to address the democracy angle for a second: card-check is no less democratic than signing a ballot petition or registering to vote – both parts of the political process that involve one-on-one meetings with committed activists asking you to somewhat publicly declare yourself, without the expectation of privacy you get in the voting booth. Keep in mind that in all union workplaces, after the first certification election, you don’t have subsequent elections as each new worker decides to join the union – an organizer comes up to them and asks them to sign as card, just like under card-check neutrality. As it stands, we have something of a democracy paradox – if a majority of people sign cards saying they want a union, the employer can demand an election; after that election, the Bush NLRB has decided, a minority of workers can sign cards saying they want to invalidate the election, and a new election has to be held. Union elections tend to be as democratic as the 99% referendums you see in banana republics – for reasons already detailed above. People have tried and failed repeatedly to reform the elections process, but you’d really have to go back and repeal Taft-Hartley and subsequent labor law, especially provisions that allow employers to spend unlimited amounts of company money on anti-union campaigns, require employees to attend vote-no meetings, require employees to attend one-on-one meetings, bar union organizers from the premises during elections, “predict” that the plant will close if the vote is yes, and so on and so forth.

One sign of how fundamentally flawed the process is: in public surveys, 44% of private-sector workers say they would like to join a union. Less than 9% of private-sector workers belong to a union.

Dream on: The vote for D.C.? Yeah, I can see that, unconstitutionally giving DC representation in Congress as though it were a state. I’m fully expecting a Democratic effort to semi-permanently entrench their party, and handing out seats to every territory and district that might vote Democratic would be an element of that.

But actual statehood would involve Congress ceding a lot of control, and they’re loath to do that. DC will remain second class, and vote ‘right’ if they know what’s good for them.

She was 100% sure that’s the way it will be and that’s the way it ought to be.

I dunno. Somehow it reminds me of the story of the ants and the grasshoppers. The ants have a lot of stuff stored, and the grasshoppers come in and say “We’re your new government and you have to keep busy working. So the ants work hard but the grasshoppers eat things faster than the ants can bring in more, and it seems like the grasshoppers are carrying some of it away to their secret bank accounts in the bahamas too. And then when there’s nothing left the grasshoppers say “OK, you’re the government now. Work hard and save, so there will be plenty for us when we come back.” And the grasshoppers go to the bahamas to wait.

Both Obama and the Congressional leadership are almost certainly not interested in legal accountability for BushCo, partly out of the native timidity of the Democrat of the species, but largely out of concern that such prosecutions would overwhelm and overshadow their legislative agenda.

They will indeed. The corruption of the Republican machine these past eight years has been so systematic, has wormed its way so much into every corner of a federal government that itself reaches into every corner of American life, that the project of rooting it out would get out of hand once started.

But it’s no use trying to hold such legal action back out of concern that it will get out of hand once Obama starts it, because it will get out of hand anyway, with or without Obama. Yes, the Obama administration will find itself in control of the federal prosecutors and in custody of much of the evidence on 1/21/09. But it will not control all of the prosecutors. It will control only a small subset of the potential plaintiffs, and none of the potential whistleblowers. To keep the lid on legal pursuit of BushCo would require not just that the new adminstration simply do nothing—not sic its prosecutors on BushCo, and not push evidence of wrongdoing out to the public. The Obama administration would have to stonewall release of evidence to litigants as zealously as BushCo now does. It would have to threaten potential whistleblowers with retribution as harsh as BushCo now does. It would have to stiff Congressional investigations as arrogantly as BushCo now does.

None of that will happen. And because it won’t happen, because Obama will fail to lead a third Bush administration, the legal pursuit of BushCo will get started on 1/21/09, and will quickly overwhelm public life in this country. The best thing to do if you truly want a progressive agenda to move forward, if you want any sort of agenda to move forward in the next 4-8 years, is to push for a comprehensive and systematic approach to the de-Republicanization and de-lobbyfication of our public life, and push for it right from the outset, while there is still a chance to channel it away from the great potential for harm inherent in the situation if the new administration, and the Congressional leadership, come to be seen as even more a part of the corruption than they, especially the latter, actually are.

And so it’s bribery, then, and hardly the democratic wonderland you suggested was the case. I note you didn’t say anything about the differing campaign conditions, and your suggestions that it’s anything like a fair campaign have been quietly shelved.

Few employers (for obvious reasons) agree to recognize the results of the card check without an election.

You actually have no clue about what you’re talking about, do you? Around 375,000 workers joined AFL-CIO affiliated unions by use of card check, rather than using the NRLB election process, and surveys carried out suggested similar low levels of workers feeling “under pressure” to join a union under card check compared to NRLB election processes (social pressure, I might add, not tyre-slashing), but much lower levels of employer intimidation.

I think the internets term is “pwned.”

Yes, the misery index. It doesn’t say much about the actual distribution of welfare, eg, of income and social supports, though, does it? I was basing my comment about “widely distributed” growth and social welfare on (what I took to be) these facts:

1) Median real wages between 1945 and 1973 for the bottom nine percentiles increased steadily.

2) Median real wages since 1980 for the bottom nine percentiles has been flat.

3) Medical, employment, and retirement security for the bottom nine percentiles has been drastically diminished since 1980 by what Jacob Hacker (and many others) call “The Great Risk Shift.”

4) Wealth and income inequality have increased drastically since 1980.

Whether these developments are directly related to decreasing unionization since 1980 is of course arguable … but not very, I’d say.

Employers aren’t ‘forcing’ employees to watch, they’re paying them to watch. If I want to hire people to watch propaganda videos 40 hours a week, I no of no law nor moral that prevents me from doing so (and my video-watching employees are either to think that’s easy money or, alternately, that they’d rather do something else for a living).

Shockingly, employers often go much farther than just ‘forcing’ employees to watch videos. Sometimes they also ‘force’ workers to be in the office for certain defined hours and to do activities that are sometimes boring or even physically tiring. Really it differs little from slavery—but that’s the sad state of the world we find ourselves in.

I don’t buy that the secret ballot in unionisation elections is the main reason we hear very little about organiser intimidation, for the simple reason that card check can currently be used to recognise a union in a workplace, although only if an employer agrees to recognise the results of the card check. Therefore, we can see if card check results in substantial organiser intimidation as compared to the secret ballot…

Nonsense. Few employers (for obvious reasons) agree to recognize the results of the card check without an election. So employees have little reason to resist signing the cards (since they can always vote against unionization in the election). But if signing cards replaced the election instead of only authorizing an election, the dynamic would be very different.

Firing pro-union workers during organizing drives—yes, that should be punished. But the rest of it is mostly legit. Employers should be able to make the case against unionization before their employees. The higher costs, reduced flexibility, and adversarial relations associated with a union workforce, all things being equal, may well result in loss of market share and lower profits in comparison with competitors who don’t have these costs and, in the long term, may result in lower investment and the long-term decline of the company. Certainly it’s a common enough pattern in the U.S. So why shouldn’t employers be able to show employees a video, say, about the experiences of GM auto workers in Flint, MI vs Toyota workers in Georgetown, KY?

The point, as has been repeatedly noted before, is not that it is a problem that employers get to campaign against a unionisation drive. It is the campaigning tactics used which abuse the employer’s power over the employee which is the problem. Threatening that their specific workplace will close if the employees join a union. And not just letting people watch anti-union campaign materials; making attendance at such events compulsory. So sayeth the libertarian; it’s ok to force someone to watch something as long as it’s anti-union.

The union, of course, can make its case as well.

No, it can’t. At least, nowhere near as effectively as the employer can. The employer can ban the union from campaigning in the workplace, pro-union workers can only campaign at designated times and places, and unions generally don’t get access to employee contact information (which would be important to, y’know, actually know who can get involved in the election) until days before the election. The gulf between the freedom the employer gets to campaign with and the draconian restrictions pro-union workers or the union itself face is astonishing.

And then the employees get to vote (in secret), so neither union nor management can use their votes against them.

And as I have noted before, it doesn’t matter how secret the ballots are if the campaign period itself places restrictions on one party’s ability to contact the voters, and is lax in dealing with the abuses of another. That’s not a level playing field in which to campaign. Any country that ran its’ legislative or presidential elections like that would be considered, rightly, a fraudulent democracy.

Just as secret ballots in political elections help prevent the ‘hypothetical bogeyman’ of vote buying and intimidation by political machines, secret ballots in union elections serve to prevent organizer intimidation. That the secret ballot works as intended is the main reason that we don’t have these problems—it’s bizarre to argue that because the problems are currently rare, we should therefore remove the protections. Would you also conclude that because you have not been the victim of the ‘hypothetical bogeyman’ of a burglar that you should remove the locks from all your doors and windows?

I don’t buy that the secret ballot in unionisation elections is the main reason we hear very little about organiser intimidation, for the simple reason that card check can currently be used to recognise a union in a workplace, although only if an employer agrees to recognise the results of the card check. Therefore, we can see if card check results in substantial organiser intimidation as compared to the secret ballot, since after all, you claim that it is the ability to cast a secret ballot, away from the prying eyes of the predatory union organiser, which prevents the slashed tyres and ugly threats you so dread. But there’s little organiser intimidation at all in the US, whether recognition drives take place under card check or secret ballot.

I keep calling your hypothetical a hypothetical because that’s all it is; it does not bear scruitiny once you look at the available evidence. The difference between a burglar and a brutish union organiser intimidating decent working folks is that only the former exist in substantial number outside of your head.

I apologise for switching realities on you. I claim that my suggestion should fit the other guy’s sense of what’s right and also fit your sense of what’s right.

The trouble is I don’t see how to make it practical. But I really like the idea of low-overhead union franchises. You decide to set up a union, you choose a franchiser, and they quick come in and show you how to set up a simple minimal structure that does what you need. Here’s how you set it up, here’s why it’s done that way, here’s the software, call us if you have problems or want to do it different.

History favors the few with $$ rather than the many.

Unfortunately true. I don’t see what to do about it, in general.

The romans set up tribunes with veto powers. I wonder whether something like that might help. Get random employees for relatively short times onto the board of directors, with veto powers? They might tend to view it as a lottery, come in at the right time and maybe get a big bribe. Or maybe not.