A response to Mike Murphy from Guy Molyneux, whose firm is polling on behalf of the AFL-CIO.
Marc,
Getting an accurate read on public attitudes toward the Employee Free Choice Act is challenging, for the reason you identify: most voters are not familiar with the bill, or current labor law, and so do not yet have a strong opinion. On such issues responses can be very sensitive to question wording, and there is no one "correct" way to ask the question, so reasonable people can quibble with almost any wording.
That this is challenging, however, is no excuse for the outrageously biased and inaccurate approach employed by CDW in its poll.
CDW describes the legislation this way: "There is a bill in Congress called the Employee Free Choice Act which would effectively replace a federally supervised secret ballot election with a process that requires a majority of workers to simply sign a card to authorize organizing a union and the workers' signatures would be made public to their employer, the union organizers and their co-workers."
Where to start?
Most importantly, the central claim is simply false, as you say in your post: the law does not replace or eliminate elections. That alone invalidates the question as a measure of public opinion.
Also:
* The use of "federally supervised" only to describe secret ballot elections implies that there is no federal oversight of the card check process, which is not true.
* Note the assertion that card check "requires a majority of workers to simply sign a card" -- to the respondent, it sounds like the law would literally require people to sign a card whether they want to or not. Whether this is just bad question writing or deliberate deception I don't know, but it's very misleading.
* As far as I know (I'm not a labor lawyer), under federal law employers do not have any legal right to inspect signatures on union authorization cards. The NLRB may review cards to authenticate signatures, but not the employer. So this claim too is false.
I'm not sure which is more surprising -- that CDW could pack so many distortions into 58 words, or that 15% of voters supported this straw man.
Our survey (Hart Research, for the AFL-CIO) provides a clear description of the card check process: it "allows employees to have a union once a majority of employees in a workplace sign authorization cards indicating they want to form a union."
Mike faults the question as too "generic." I disagree, but your readers can judge for themselves.
It's true that we don't ask about secret ballot elections one way or the other, but that's because -- as you note -- the Employee Free Choice Act does not eliminate such elections. It simply removes employer's ability to prevent a card check election, and thus effectively makes card check available to all employees. Hence our focus on that process.
As I say, reasonable people might feel our wording could be improved upon.
But our question is a reasonable effort to measure public attitudes and includes no false statements or inaccuracies, a test the CDW poll can't pass.
And that's a pretty significant difference.
Guy Molyneux
Partner, Hart Research Associates
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