The Employee Free Choice Act should be renamed the Faux Choice Act

A new federal labor law, proposed by the AFL-CIO, is making its way through Congress, and President Obama said he will sign it. It is called the Employee Free Choice Act. Given that name, which of the following three options would it fit?

Option one. An organizer hands you a card. If you sign, the union represents you.

Option two. An organizer hands you a card. If 30 percent of the employees in your group sign such cards, the government holds a secret-ballot election. If the union wins a majority of those voting, it represents everyone in the group, including you.

Option three. An organizer hands you a card. If a majority of the workers in your group sign such cards, the union represents everyone in the group, including you.

You see the difference. Option one gives you a choice. Options two and three give you a vote, which is not as good as a choice.

Option one is what existed before 1935. Option two is what has existed since then. Option three, called card-check, is part of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Business opposed option two in the 1930s, but has learned to like it. Business argues that a secret ballot protects the employee and the integrity of the election. Card-check, says business, is like having a political official come to your home, hand you a ballot, ask you to mark it and hand it back.

That is an argument for clean elections, not for choice. In America, there is very little choice about union representation. A job comes labeled: it is union-represented or it isn't. The employee has certain rights to choose whether to be a "member" of the union, but generally not about whether the union represents him. That is determined by others — initially by an election, and after that, by bargaining between union and employer.

For 16 years, I was in a union at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. For part of that time, I was in a work group the company wanted to take out of the union. The union wanted us in. We were the subject of a negotiation. We had nothing to say about it because the representation election had already been held.

At the P-I, it had been held in 1936. By the time I asked about it, most of the people who had voted in it were dead. Still, we employees were bound by it. We could have another election only by circulating petitions to "decertify" the union, which was a hostile action no one was willing to take.

The P-I's union had one representation election in 74 years.

Whether unions are good or bad is a another question, and needs a more complicated answer than yes or no. The P-I's union did some good things. I appreciated the pension plan and worked to improve it. But the union never asked each of us whether we wanted to be in it, because it didn't have to.

I prefer the pre-1935 rule: Unions represented the people who joined them. That world is often portrayed as anti-union, but it allowed the rise of famous unions, from Dave Beck's Teamsters to Bill Haywood's Industrial Workers of the World. In those days, unions had to struggle to gain workers' allegiance and also to keep it. It made them tough and vital.

Organized labor doesn't want that world, nor does business. Real choice sounds messy, and anyway it's not the world they know. They prefer elections — faux choice — and have narrowed the argument to what kind.

I'll take secret ballots, I guess. But it's not employee free choice.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com