Union re-certification elections needed

Washington Examiner Editorial:

Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch, of Utah, and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, recently introduced the Employee Rights Act of 2013. Their proposal includes a provision requiring that unions undergo recertification elections at regular intervals. (The measures has 68 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives and 26 in the Senate). Some advocates will perhaps say every three years would be an appropriate interval, and others might say five years. In his landmark public employee union reforms for Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker made recertification an annual event.

Whatever the interval, the experience of Wisconsin teachers' union members points to the importance of recertification becoming a national norm. As the Weekly Standard's John McCormack recently reported, “Teachers unions in nineteen different Wisconsin school districts failed to achieve recertification during annual elections that ended Thursday. ... Under Act 10, the Wisconsin law signed by Gov. Scott Walker that reformed collective bargaining for public sector unions, each union is required to get the support of a majority of its members -- not simply a majority of those casting votes -- in order to maintain certification each year.

“An additional 51 collective bargaining units representing support staff, substitute teachers, and custodians in various school districts also disbanded, which means that a total of 70 out of the state's 408 collective bargaining units associated with education failed to achieve recertification this year. The elections were conducted by a telephone voting system over a three-week period.”

Town Hall's Matt Batzel estimates that about 100,000 Wisconsin public employees have voted to decertify their unions in the two years Walker's reforms have been on the books.
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Scott Walker's reforms revealed something about the union movement that was little known and it is a real threat to the union bosses and their corrupt bargain with Democrat politicians.  All unions should be required to undergo the re-certification process.