Hat tip to Peter Dierks:
Why Card Check Is Unconstitutional
Only secret ballots are consistent with the First Amendment.
By DAVID B. RIVKIN JR. and LEE A. CASEY
The Wal Street Journal Online
MARCH 30, 2009
The Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 -- otherwise known as "card check" -- is organized labor's dream. As a practical matter, this legislation, pursued by both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, would do away with the secret ballot in the unionization process. Although card check's advocates and critics have spilled much ink arguing about the bill's fundamental fairness to labor and management, so far the debate has not focused on the other compelling interest at stake: the constitutionally protected right of employees to keep their opinions on controversial issues like unionization to themselves. This is card check's Achilles' heel.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech, along with the Fifth and 14th Amendment due process clauses, to protect a variety of expressive and associational rights. The right to speak and associate anonymously is among those rights. Indeed, anonymous speech has a long and honored tradition in American politics. Much of the political agitation leading up to the American Revolution was necessarily anonymous in order to avoid British sedition charges. And three of the Constitution's Framers -- James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay -- wrote the Federalist Papers supporting its ratification under the anonymous pen name "Publius."
The Supreme Court has consistently recognized the importance of this type of political discourse. The reason is obvious: Public speech on contentious issues often inflames passions, prompting intimidation and retaliation. Outing speakers who prefer anonymity chills speech, and has the potential to suppress it entirely.
In an early and important case, NAACP v. Patterson, 1958, the state of Alabama attempted to obtain a listing of the NAACP's membership, although the organization had "made an uncontroverted showing" that revealing the identities of its members had, in the past, exposed them to "economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercions and other manifestations of public hostility." The Supreme Court affirmed the NAACP's right to associate freely and privately.
The Court similarly vindicated the right to anonymous speech in political campaigns in the 1995 case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission. It struck down a law forbidding distribution of unsigned campaign literature, reasoning that the state had shown no interest compelling enough (such as the integrity of the campaign financing process) to justify restrictions on this core First Amendment right. "Identification of the author against her will," the Court explained, "is particularly intrusive; it reveals unmistakably the content of her thoughts on a controversial issue."
When courts have upheld restrictions on anonymous speech, they have required that such provisions be narrowly tailored to serve an overriding governmental interest. Moreover, they have been most comfortable in upholding these provisions when the competing interest itself also involved the protection of First Amendment values.
Thus, for example, campaign contribution limits and disclosures have been defended as necessary anticorruption measures, balancing the abridgement of individual speech against the integrity of the political process, and protecting the marketplace of ideas. Whatever one thinks about the legal strength of these rationales -- and they have many detractors -- it's clear that the judiciary has used them when balancing competing First Amendment interests.
There can be little doubt that the act of voting on important issues is a form of symbolic speech, residing at the very core of the interests protected by the Constitution. The secret ballot has not only been adopted in federal and state elections, it is recognized as a fundamental human right in a number of international instruments. This includes the U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, that requires secret ballot voting as "guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors."
Labor organizing has been one of the most contentious exercises in modern American history, often leading to violence and employee intimidation on both the management and union side. Demanding that workers state publicly (by checking "yes" or "no" on a card) whether they support unionization would involve real and immediate dangers of intimidation, and would deprive workers of their right to anonymous expression. The fact that individuals could refuse to sign a card is unavailing, since a refusal to choose, in this instance, is an effective no.
Card-check supporters may argue that the activities of labor organizers, no matter how intimidating, involve purely private actions to which the Constitution's protections of free speech and association do not apply. However, the Supreme Court has recognized that certain government-sanctioned regulatory schemes can give associated private conduct the character of state or federal action, making the Constitution applicable.
In one early case, Public Utilities Commission v. Pollack (1952), the Court ruled that a private, Washington, D.C., bus company, which operated a radio news and music service in its vehicles that prompted customer complaints of unwanted political indoctrination, was subject to First and Fifth Amendment requirements. The Court reasoned that the Constitution applied since the local public utility commission had permitted the challenged service. In another important case, Railway Employees' Department v. Hanson (1956), the Court concluded that federal authorization of "union shop" agreements (under the Railway Labor Act) meant that governmental action was present because "the federal statute is the source of the power and authority by which any private rights are lost or sacrificed."
The same would be true of card check, which would endow a successful authorization-card drive by labor organizers with immediate consequences under federal law. The National Labor Relations Board would, under the new law, have to "certify" a collective bargaining unit based upon the completed cards. And the new law would effectively subject employer and employees to binding arbitration.
The presence of sufficient governmental action to require constitutional scrutiny can often be a fact-intensive inquiry. But when such mandatory legal consequences result from ostensibly private conduct, the courts would certainly be justified in concluding that the Constitution's requirements apply.
Sanctioning -- and thereby promoting -- demands that employees publicly disclose how they feel about unionization clearly violates their First Amendment entitlement to vote and practice their speech privately. Significantly, unlike other cases in which such restrictions have been upheld, union organizers cannot articulate even a semblance of an offsetting First Amendment value. While they may complain that the current system does not favor unionization and hence inhibits their associational rights, the problem, if any, arises from possible employer intimidation -- not from the secret ballot as such.
In this context, the new law would entitle organized labor to the government's imprimatur of its card-check choice. With the government thus supporting demands that employees publicly state their opinions on a controversial matter, the courts should view card-check's provisions as being ill-tailored to meet the problem of employer intimidation, and thus, unconstitutional.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey are Washington, D.C., lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
online.wsj.com |
