Fearful of proposed federal legislation designed to boost union membership across the nation, business interests in Arizona and several other states are launching ballot initiative efforts that will test federal supremacy over state constitutions.
On Dec. 30, Sidney Hay, a leading representative of Arizona’s mining industry, officially registered a ballot initiative committee intent on amending the state Constitution to secure Arizonans’ right to secret ballot elections.
That right is already secure when citizens cast votes for political candidates and ballot measures. What Hay’s Save Our Secret Ballot committee seeks to establish is a guarantee that employees will be allowed to decide whether to unionize with the same level of voting privacy.
The goal, which could be decided by voters in 2010, would place the state on a collision course with the federal Employee Free Choice Act, a proposal supported by President-elect Barack Obama and Democrat congressional leaders.
The act mandates a union be formed if labor organizers secure the approval of a majority of a business’ workers in writing, a process known as the “card-check” system that opponents such as Hay claim leaves workers vulnerable to intimidation from unions and businesses alike.
“The Employee Free Choice Act is anything but free choice for an employee,” said Hay, who mounted an unsuccessful 2008 campaign for Congress. “It’s purely an effort to grow labor unions nationwide and it’s not a good trade-off for the right to a secret ballot.”
Right now, if 30 percent of employees sign cards indicating their desire to unionize, a federally supervised secret ballot election is held to determine if workers can form an organized union. Unions also can engage in direct negotiations with management to secure organizing rights.
As first reported by Capitol Media Services, national and Arizona union membership has fallen over the past 25 years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 20 percent of workers were union members in 1983, compared to the roughly 12 percent range recorded in 2007.
Likewise, 14.3 percent of employees in Arizona were unionized in 1983, while last year 9.7 were members of labor unions, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
While national and state business groups cringe at the legislation, which stalled in the U.S. Senate last year, unions and their allies say without the card-check process businesses are free to take reprisals against organizing employees and to threaten workers before elections are held.
“It’s a process that gives workers even more of a voice because their vote is their signature,” said James McLaughlin, president of the United Food Commercial Workers Local 99. “The card-check process is probably one of the most democratic processes out there.”
McLaughlin, whose union represents roughly 14,000 food service workers, said card-check opponents’ interest is maintaining corporate control over employees. The same critics also opposed minimum-wage increases and publicly funded campaigns that have increased the influence and well-being of “everyday working Arizonans,” he said.
Hay said her group will file ballot initiative language on Jan. 2. Her effort, which mirrors others being conducted in Arkansas and Missouri, is also expected to run in tandem with legislative ballot referendums in Nevada and Utah.
The united drive to call for secret-ballot protection is also meant to send a message to card-check supporters in Congress to urge reconsideration, said Hay, while adding she does not believe Arizona’s Democrat delegation is likely to reverse their support.
But Clint Bolick, an attorney with the Goldwater Institute, does not believe thwarting the federal card-check proposal’s progress and authorization is a realistic goal.
In a four-page legal analysis, Bolick writes that he believes the labor movement’s “top priority” will be “rapidly approved by the new Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama.”
And swift action on the legislation would make card-check organizing processes the law in Arizona, leaving a “window” without secret ballot elections before the proposed Save Our Secret Ballot amendment could take place, he said.
Hay, Bolick and other proponents of the ballot initiative would need to collect more than 230,000 valid signatures of Arizona voters to qualify for the 2010 ballot. And if voters ultimately approve the measure, legal action would almost certainly follow.
The proposed amendment will “create a constitutional clash” pitting the Federal Supremacy Clause, which provides that federal law trumps conflicting state laws, against state interests in “protecting individual liberties in our system of federalism,” wrote Bolick.
Calling the right to secret-ballot elections a “fundamental interest,” Bolick said he was optimistic the “state constitutional provisions would stand up to the federal law.”