UAW wants to unionize Indiana autoworkers by stacking the deck

The United Auto Workers spiked the football after achieving what it called a “major victory” over Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. The strike that led to its victory dance resulted in thousands of layoffs and what will no doubt be stagnant job growth in the domestic car making industry for years to come.

Some victory.

UAW President Shawn Fain wasted little time in turning his attention to foreign automakers outside of Michigan. The union won a victory at a Tennessee VW plant earlier this spring.

Briggs: Mike Braun deserves every minute of his new political hell

Briggs: Red Lobster again proves if you subsidize stuff, people will take it

But a funny thing happened on the way to UAW dominance – workers pushed back. First, workers at a Nissan facility in New Jersey voted to decertify the UAW because they felt the union had sold them a bill of goods to gain a foothold and then proceeded to ignore them. Then, workers at an Alabama Mercedes plant voted overwhelmingly to reject the union.

Now, the UAW is coming to Indiana and the message is clear: As it runs out of steam, it’s not looking out for workers; it’s only looking to rake in dues, even if that means limiting workers’ rights.

One need look no further than the tactics the union uses to expand its power base at the expense of worker freedom. It takes a special kind of cynicism to pressure potential opposition into silence and to revoke worker voting rights just to boost membership. But that’s how unions organize now — not by the ballot, but rather by rigging the game at the workers’ expense.

The UAW has collected signatures in other states through a process called “card check” in which workers are asked to publicly state whether they back the union or not. Think about that for a moment. Imagine the pressure workers are under when union representatives comb facilities — or call them at home! — pressuring them to sign the card.

Unions like the UAW have advocated for new legislation compelling employers to accept card check procedures. Despite ongoing legislative efforts, unions have not yet succeeded in securing card check requirements through legal means.

Maybe that’s why the Biden-Harris-appointed bureaucrats on the National Labor Relations Board recently rendered a decision enabling the agency to replace elections with card-based processes in a broader range of scenarios. This decision contradicts numerous court rulings emphasizing that secret ballots, as opposed to cards, remain the most reliable indicator of employees' union preferences.

Unions also want to stifle employer speech during union organizing campaigns. Thirty-three blue state senators who are in cahoots with the UAW sent a letter to international automakers — like those with facilities in Indiana — essentially threatening them to accept so-called neutrality agreements when the UAW comes knocking on the shop door. Under neutrality agreements, employers are prohibited from expressing their points of view about unions to workers, despite decades of legal precedent protecting this right.

By leveraging left-wing heavyweights in Washington to cajole employers into these agreements, the UAW is hoping to deprive Hoosier autoworkers of highly relevant facts and much-needed context about what joining the union could mean for them, their families and their community. For example, their careers could be truncated by strikes or ended completely due to layoffs.

If you need any more evidence that the UAW is not interested in the will of the workers it seeks to represent, then consider this fact. The union is asking the NLRB to reverse the outcome of its failed organizing campaign in Alabama. In other words, it is attempting to get federal bureaucrats in Washington to override the workers’ votes.

Hoosiers need to know that when the union declares victory, it’s a victory for the union, not the workers it claims to represent.

Josh Webb is the State Director of Americans for Prosperity-Indiana.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: UAW's Indiana union drive seeks to kill secret ballots