Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao weighs in against the horrifically misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” in today’s Wall Street Journal. She writes:

It is incredible that interest groups who say they are advocates for workers are striving to end workers’ opportunity to have private union elections. Coincidentally, or not, unionization has shrunk in the past 50 years, from 35% of the private sector workforce in the 1950s, to 7.4% today.

Without the protection of secret ballot elections, American workers would have no protection from coercion. One does not need to be a scholar on card check to anticipate the pressure and coercion that could then emanate from all sides. Indeed, a former union organizer testified at a congressional hearing recently that she had “personally heard from workers that they signed the union card simply to get the organizer to leave their home and not harass them further.”