Union Recertification

What it does: Requires that every unionized workplace have a guarantee of a periodic supervised secret ballot election to determine whether employees want to continue to be represented by an incumbent union. The election will coincide with contract renegotiations, and will only occur once the workforce has turned over by more than 50 percent since the last election.

Support: 85% of non-union households were strongly/somewhat supportive.
77% of union households were strongly/somewhat supportive.

Why: Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) indicate that only seven percent of currently unionized employees voted for the union in their workplace.

Background:  Union membership hit its peak in 1954, when nearly 30 percent of the workforce was unionized (both private and public sector). Since then, private sector union membership has seen a precipitous drop to today’s record low of 6.6 percent. Because union decertification is difficult, a current workplace unionized in the 1950s or 1960s is almost assuredly still unionized today.
Once a workplace is unionized it is nearly impossible for employees to decertify a union.
This provision is especially important in light of the NLRB’s proposal to fundamentally shorten the time period for elections so that employees have insufficient time to formulate an informed vote. A periodic vote, scheduled to coincide with the typical contract renewal cycle, is much like the regular elections that public officials have to participate in to have their public support revalidated or repudiated.

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