Cingular Wireless Submits Brief Supporting Card Check

Saying that majority card check organizing has ensured civility and respect for employers, unions and workers, Cingular Wireless is urging the National Labor Relations Board to uphold the rights of labor and management to agree to a card check process.

The agreements have minimized disruption and allowed "for the orderly conduct of the company's day-to-day business in a fair and efficient manner," the company said in a friend of the court brief in a pending case. "Simply stated, these agreements have worked well."

The NLRB is expected to issue a decision soon in a case brought by the so-called National "Right to Work" Committee against both the UAW and Dana Corporation, an auto parts company that agreed to allow the UAW to pursue card check organizing.

The case will decide whether and to what extent an employer and a union can negotiate an agreement that sets forth conditions for union organizing, potentially stripping away the right to organize by card check.

"Whatever the NLRB decides, the fact that this case is even on the docket illustrates why we so badly need the Employee Free Choice Act," CWA President Larry Cohen said. "Once we have a federal law protecting the rights of workers to organize without employer interference, I believe many companies will come to see things the way Cingular has — that card check is a fair and non-confrontational way for workers to choose a union, or not, and that both employees and employers benefit."

CWA's agreements with Cingular, which has brought nearly 40,000 new members into the union in recent years, are considered one of the labor movement's top success stories.

Workers at Dana auto part plants in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Michigan have chosen union representation by card check. Anti-union Right to Work lawyers tried to get the union's neutrality agreement with Dana tossed out but in 2005 an NLRB administrative law judge upheld it, leading to the appeal now before the full five-member board. The same union-busting group was behind a decertification election at Dana's Buena Vista, Va., plant earlier this year. Workers voted 3-1 to stick with the union.

The Right to Work group has tried to argue that card check is unfair to workers who oppose unions. Cingular responded that card check addresses those workers' interests just as well as a standard union election would. "In both processes, employees are afforded an individual choice to participate or not," the company said. "Cingular has always believed that representation by a union is a matter of individual choice for our employees and we have respected their decision."