The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is fundamentally incompatible with protecting the interests of individual liberty and the principles of a sound democracy.

EFCA would take away a worker’s right to a federally supervised private ballot when deciding whether or not to join a union.

EFCA would roll back the clock on our own workplace elections by abolishing federally protected private ballots at a time when our nation spends tremendous resources to foster and support free elections around the world.

EFCA would replace the private ballot with a biased and inferior process called “Card Check” which allows a union to organize if a majority of workers simply sign a card. Sadly, to get workers to sign the cards, union organizers could approach workers almost anywhere, even at their homes.

Under Card Check workers’ choices are made public to the employer, the union organizers and co-workers.

Card Check tramples the privacy of individual workers who should not have to reveal to anyone how they exercise their right to choose whether to organize with their coworkers in a union.

Card Check is unreliable. Union organizing manuals have long cautioned organizers that a worker’s signature on a union card does not mean that he or she wants to join a union or will vote for the union in the election.

Labor activists allege that employers file baseless objections giving them more time to subject worker to anti-union intimidation. These claims are simply false. Over 94 percent of organizing elections take place within eight weeks after organizers have filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board! 

Labor activists contend that EFCA would protect workers’ freedom to freely choose to join a union. However, workers’ best defense against harassment and intimidation by either a union or an employer is a secret-ballot election in which neither knows how any individual worker voted.

Contrary to labor activist claims, Zogby polling shows that 71 percent of union members believe that the current private-ballot process is fair, versus only 13 percent who disagree.