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Argument: Unions are dwindling because few workers care to join

Issue Report: Employee Free Choice Act

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James Sherk and Paul Kersey. “How the Employee Free Choice Act Takes Away Workers’ Rights”. Heritage Foundation. 23 Apr. 2007 – “Few Workers Want to Organize. Union activ­ists contend that the low level of unionization in the United States proves that elections do not reflect workers’ free choice. They argue that most Ameri­can workers actually want to join a union. They back this up with polling numbers showing that 53 percent of non-union workers, or 57 million work­ers, would like to belong to a union. However those numbers are highly suspect. The AFL-CIO commissioned the poll. Peter Hart, a Dem­ocratic pollster, conducted it. The poll itself remains unpublished, and the AFL-CIO has not revealed the questions or polling methodologies used. Publicly publishedpolls conducted by nonparti­san pollsters show the opposite: Relatively few non-union workers want general representation. Zogby polling shows that, by a margin of more than 3 to 1, non-union workers do not want to belong to a labor union.[49] Because a union must win the support of a majority of a company’s workers to win recognition, the fact that relatively few workers belong to a union is not surprising.”