Last week, blogger Clayton Cramer gave his take on why Big Labor bosses would want to wipe out secret ballot elections from the American workplace. His account includes some telling examples of union boss intimidation:

I am more inclined to suspect that a lot of people sign the union authorization cards because they are either strongly encouraged or even directly threatened to do so. Labor unions are fundamentally institutions of organized violence. A friend who has since passed on left me this account of working in a union shop in California during World War II (when the federal government leaned pretty heavily on employers to accept unions):

Our next problem was that after three months on the job, workers were required to join the paper workers union. Those who did not received disfiguring beatings after hours. Having seen what happened to another girl in same position as Wanda and I, we decided that rather than face the same treatment we would quit our jobs before the three months ended.

I remember being quite young and surprised that my father was home during the day. He explained that his union, the Boilermakers/Blacksmiths, had gone on strike. "Can’t you go to work anyway?"

"Not if you want to live."

And unfortunately, this wasn’t just his imagination. There’s a fascinating decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. v. Enmons (1973), that held that the Hobbs Act that "makes it a federal crime to obstruct interstate commerce by robbery or extortion" did not apply to labor unions engaged in destroying power company transformers with rifles and explosives because such use of violence did not qualify as extortion.
Extortion means that you are getting something that you don’t have a right to get–while higher wages obtained through such violence was a legitimate union bargaining tactic. The Court may have actually come to the right conclusion, based on the legal definition of extortion and the legislative intent of the Hobbs Act–but it does show you something of how labor unions get things done.

I had a friend in California who grew up in Michigan. His father was a UAW local official. He remembered vividly being in a coffee shop with his family one day. The guy in the next booth made some remark to a companion that was uncomplimentary to the union–and my friend’s father instinctively swung his coffee mug around and shattered it on this guy’s jaw.

There’s a long and ugly, bloody, deadly history of corporations and labor unions fighting it out in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There’s plenty of evil that was done by both sides. But this is not the situation today–not even close. Labor violence today is almost entirely by labor unions. I can easily believe that the reason that the AFL-CIO wants to "streamline" the process is that they are intimidating workers into signing authorization cards–and don’t dare risk a secret ballot.

Well said.

To learn more on how union organizers mislead workers into signing away their rights and to view an appalling example of an actual "authorization card" used by Teamster union organizers to deceive employees into compulsory unionism, click here: Spotlight on "Card Check" Deception.