Save the Secret Ballot!

Image that, when you went to vote, you had to do it in the open, with everyone watching you. If you voted against the people in power locally, you could expect dangerous repercussions. You might even find that "accidents" started to happen to your property, or even to yourself and family members. Can you image the hue and cry that liberals, who don't want you to even have to show an ID to vote, would send up if we wanted to take away their secret ballots and force them to vote in public?! They'd scream "voter intimidation!" at the top of their lungs.

Yet that's exactly what liberals want to do on behalf of Big Labor, which these days basically serves as another arm of the Democrat party. Democrats want to remove the secret ballot from labor union elections, so that labor union thugs and bullies can intimidate workers into voting for their corrupt unions. From a peak of 34.7% in 1954, union membership as a share of the workforce has fallen precipitously over the decades, and now represents (as of 2008) only 12.4% of the workforce. Only union gains among "public employees"--i.e., professional bureaucrats--has stopped union membership from declining into single digits. Even with the rise of the professional bureaucrat unions, union membership as a percentage of the workforce has fallen back to the levels that existed before the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 transformed labor unions into government-backed labor cartels (monopolies). As Big Labor has become increasingly a liberal arm of the Democrat party, fighting for abortion, homosexual marriage, higher taxes, more government spending and other issues of no relevance to workers as workers, the workforce has increasingly left Big Labor.

Desperate to force workers back onto the Big Labor plantation, where the Democrats can siphon workers' wages into political campaign funds, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are trying to take away the secret ballot and allow their union thugs to intimidate honest workers into voting for their corrupt unions.

While hypocrisy and hostility toward honest working people from liberals and Democrats come as no surprise, that doesn't mean we should do nothing about it. You can sign the petition at http://www.americansolutions.com/Actioncenter/Petitions/Default.aspx?guid=87f7f73f-48bc-44c9-965b-e86805571adf opposing the dishonestly-named "Employee Free Choice Act," which would go better under the name "Union Thug Stimulus Act."