By Gil McGowan, AFL Staff

What’s wrong with a little democracy? That’s the question that anti-union employers and politicians ask whenever people from the labour movement complain about certification votes.

At first blush, the defenders of Alberta’s current system for certifying new union locals seem to have the moral high ground.

After all, what’s wrong with a system in which unions have to sign up 40 percent of the employees in a given workplace before being granted the right to a certification vote? And, what could possibly be wrong with a secret ballot vote? Letting people vote on whether or not they want to join a union could never be a bad thing, right?

Well, last month I learned some important lessons about the reality of the certification process in Alberta. In particular, I learned that Alberta’s rules regarding union certification aren’t really about promoting democracy – they’re about throwing roadblocks in the way of union organizing campaigns.

The truth about certification process became painfully clear to me on July 21^st when I traveled to Brooks, about 250 km east of Calgary. I had been invited to accompany UFCW 401 president Doug O’Halloran and UFCW organizer Archie Duckworth when they met with workers at the Lakeside meat-packing plant.

My job was to tell the workers about the advantages of union membership. Using information from Statistics Canada, the federal government and numerous other impartial sources, I had planned to demonstrate that a real union advantage exists when it comes to things like wages, benefits, health and safety and job satisfaction.

Along with Doug and Archie, I made six presentations to groups of between 200 and 300 Lakeside employees. But, to my frustration, we found it difficult – sometimes impossible – to get our points across. That’s because each of the meetings were disrupted by 30 or 40 anti-union employees and lower-management types (e.g. lead hands and trainers).

Instead of listening to the union presentation, these people shouted obscenities and hurled eggs and waded balls of paper at the podium. At least one person – who described himself as a health and safety inspector for the company – made a death threat against one of the union representatives. In another meeting, a burly man from the plants’ killing floor dared union "sympathizers" to come forward and then threatened them with physical violence.

Some people might shrug this behaviour off as the merely the work of over-zealous individuals who happen to oppose unions on principle. But based on what I saw that day and what I learned from union staff active in the organizing drive, it was clear to me that this was not simply a case of angry individuals acting alone – the company was also involved.

The company set a hostile tone for the meetings by circulating anti-union literature to employees and by allowing the most vocal anti-union workers to attend several meetings, even though they were only supposed to attend one.

The company also set a hostile tone for the meetings by using the time between the union’s certification application and the actual vote to show an anti-union video to all employees. The video – produced by an American consulting firm that specializes in keeping companies "union free" – depicted unions members as violent thugs and unions as backward organizations that "exist to strike."

During the many weeks that elapsed between the certification application and the vote, the company used it’s virtually unlimited access to employees to poison the waters. By the time the union got its chance to address the workers – on the day before the vote – the damage had already been done. Every employee at the plant knew that management did not look favourably on union supporters. They also knew many of their co-workers would make life at the plant hard on those who supported the union.

This is the reality of the system for certifying new union locals under Alberta law. It’s not about giving workers a chance to vote their conscience. It’s about buying time for the employer to mount an anti-union campaign and whip up sentiment against the union.

Given this reality, it’s almost laughable to hear people to defending Alberta’s labour law as democratic. Democratic voting only works if people can cast their ballots in an atmosphere free from hostility and coercion. People must feel free to vote any way they please.

This was not the case in Brooks – and it’s not the case in many other certification votes in Alberta. Many workers are fearful of retribution from their employer or their co-workers – so they don’t vote their conscience.

The vote in Brooks actually reminded me of so-called democratic votes in authoritarian countries – places like Iraq or the former Soviet Union. In these places, whenever a vote is held – low and behold – 99 per cent of the people voice support for the sitting dictator or military strong man. No one observing these kind of elections believes that this is democracy. No one really believes that the people really voted their hearts. Instead they vote out of fear – or out of a sense of helplessness.

Other jurisdictions in Canada have recognized the problems inherent in holding certification votes on company property. The federal government and the governments of B.C., Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick and P.E.I have all taken a different approach – using a system called automatic certification.

Under this system, employers are not given long periods to brow beat their workers and discourage them from joining a union. And there are no large public forums in the workplace where union supporters can be singled out. Instead, under an automatic certification system, workers simply have to meet with a union organizer and sign a union card. That’s how they cast a "yes" ballot for the union. Once the union collects signed union cards from 50 percent of the workers plus one, the local is automatically certified.

The real strength of the automatic certification system is that it recognizes that the employer wields a disproportionate amount of influence in the workplace. To deal with this problem, the decision about whether or not to join a union is taken out of the workplace. Workers are able to make up their minds in the comfort of their own homes, without undue pressure from their employer and without threats or intimidation from other workers or managers. Experience has shown that this approach – automatic certification – is the only real way to ensure that workers can express their wishes freely.

My experience in Brooks provided me with a graphic, first-hand illustration of the weaknesses of Alberta’s system for certifying new union locals. It also strengthened my resolve to continue fighting for an automatic certification system – a system in which the democratic rights of workers are real, not imagined.