Big labor apologists are talking about a so-called “union boom,” but the numbers show the opposite is true — workers overwhelmingly don’t want unions in their workplaces.
In recent Senate Labor Committee hearings, union partisans, including Bernie Sanders, cited a Gallup poll from last summer regarding “union approval” rates.
Yet they fail to mention the same poll that asks a more important question: Do non-unionized workers really want to join a union?
The answer was a resounding NO.
A large majority said they were “not at all interested” in joining a union, while only 1 in 10 were very interested in joining a union.
But this is not the only evidence that workers do not want to join unions voluntarily.
An important, if underreported, trend in recent years is that unionized workers are seeking votes to remove unions they oppose.
The National Labor Relations Board’s own case statistics on union election petitions show that in 2022, a union-controlled worker was much more likely to seek a vote to drop that union than a non-union worker to unionize. There was a possibility of asking for votes.
Not only that, but last year there was a 20% increase in petitions for votes to remove a union from a workplace – called a decertification election – compared to 2021.
Starbucks workers in New York state — whose unionization made headlines not long ago — are already calling for votes to end union “representation,” including at a flagship Starbucks Roastery location in Manhattan.
As demonstrated in some recent cases brought by National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys for workers opposing union recognition, workers want nothing to do with union officials and their so-called “representation.”
Take the case of Tanner Bradigan, a Delaware concrete worker who attended the International Union of Operating Engineers meeting in December to see what the union was offering.
When the 24-year-old said that union officials’ answers to workers’ inquiries were inadequate and that he would not support the union, union bosses threatened Bradigan and anyone else with physical violence to oppose the union.
Unfortunately, this case is not a one-off. The workers have to face all kinds of cheats and dirty tricks at the hands of the union bullies.
Jessica Hefner, a Texas Kroger employee, said she was asked by a union official to opt out of union dues by writing “$0” in the dues slot on her union card.
Only later did he discover that his dues card had been changed, so union dues would still be deducted from his paycheck, without his knowledge or permission.
These are just two examples of hundreds of cases filed by NRWF attorneys for workers victims of forced-unionism abuses in the past year alone.
If a business mistreats its customers the way union officials often mistreat rank-and-file workers, it will either have to clean up its act quickly or go out of business.
Big labor officials, however, can use government-granted power to prevent workers from fleeing union ranks.
Led by former union lawyers, the Biden National Labor Relations Board is now doing just that in ongoing rulemaking to overturn the “election protection rule.”
That rule, which we support, eliminated some of the most egregious tactics used by union officials to delay or block worker-requested decertification votes.
Also on the chopping block is an amendment that would allow workers to request a secret-ballot vote challenging unionization through a “card check,” a process where union organizers pressure and often require workers to have union cards. Misleads to sign that count as “votes” for unionization.
This rollback is especially pernicious because Jennifer Abruzzo, union-lawyer-turned-NLRB-general-counsel, is trying to overturn more than half a century of legal precedent to mandate such card-check unionization.
In other words, the Biden labor board is simultaneously trying to make it easier for unions to force workers into their ranks and harder for workers to avoid unions they oppose.
Union bosses and their political allies are trying to spin the lie that workers overwhelmingly want to stay in unions.
But Biden’s pursuit of the NLRB’s increasingly coercive legal order is an effective admission that government force is the real union-organizing tool.
American workers do not appreciate being pushed into unions or treated like pawns in a game where union-backed politicians try to pay back those who support their election.
Until union owners and their partners in government realize that workers are not political tools, workers will remain skeptical of unionization.
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Foundation.
