Here's my problem with George Will

Conservative columnist George Will is one of the best conservative minds around, and as far as columnists go, he can be pretty compelling a lot of the time, even if you don't agree with him.

I don't have a problem with the content of his opinions from time to time, but he does have a tendency to sometimes state his opinions or analysis as fact. It reminds me of  Daniel Patrick Moynihan's longtime quote "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."

Such a stating of opinion as fact is one of my pet peeves. It annoys me because stating opinion as fact is misleading and wrong and most importantly, intellectually dishonest. I don't let Free Press letter writers get away with it.

So, I will take George Will to task for a column in Tuesday's Free Press.

Will's opinion stated as fact: "Card check legislation would make it easier to herd private sector workers into unions by abolishing the right to secret ballots in unionization votes."

Will's intellectual dishonesty comes in the phrase "abolishing the right to secret ballots in unionization votes."

The card check legislation does not "abolish" the secret ballot. Rather, it allows those organizing unions two options when organizing a union vote. It allows them a new option known as the card check. In other words, they could simply ask employees to vote up or down on a union by using a card, yes or no. If 50 percent of workers say yes, the union can be established.

However, they can also request a secret ballot under the card check law.

When Will says the law would "abolish," one takes that to mean "abolish the secret ballot in every and any case." But that's not the case, as reported below by Politifact, a division of the St. Petersburg Times newspaper that both political parties often use to back up their facts.

In 2009 when the Card Check issue was hot, (it never made it anywhere), here's how Politifact described it:

"Here's how union elections work now:

Union organizers try to get employees in a particular business or unit of a business to sign cards indicating they want the union to represent them in negotiations with the employer. The employer is not permitted to see the cards before they are turned in to the National Labor Relations Board — or often even after that — or engage in any other kind of surveillance to try to discern which employees are union adherents and which are not.

If more than 30 percent of the employees sign, the union can ask the National Labor Relations Board to conduct an election. If more than 50 percent sign, the employer must either accept the union or ask the board for an election.

Most employers ask for an election. It takes place a few weeks later at the employer's place of business. It's a secret-ballot election and is run by the National Labor Relations Board. If a majority votes for the union, the union wins.

Here's what would happen under the Employee Free Choice Act:(or Card Check).

Just like before, if unions got more than 30 percent of the employees to sign cards, they could ask for a secret-ballot election. But if they got more than 50 percent, the union would win automatically. The employer would no longer have the right to insist on a secret-ballot election and would have to negotiate with the union. 

"Decertification" elections, where the employees vote on whether to cease being represented by their union, are currently secret-ballot elections, and would continue to be under the Employee Free Choice Act.

As a practical matter, secret-ballot elections would be far less frequent if the Employee Free Choice Act were passed. But they would still take place under certain circumstances: during decertification contests, or on the occasions where unions won the support of more than 30 percent but less than 50 percent of the employees (but unions don't generally ask for elections unless they have the support of more than half).

There would also continue to be secret-ballot elections in instances where a majority of employees say they want one. That is, where more than 50 percent of the employees sign cards requesting a vote on unionization rather than cards saying they want a union to represent them."


Here's the whole Politifact article

So Will appears unwilling to go into the nuances and would rather just state his opinion as a fact.

I'd be much more comfortable with him if he just said "Card check HAS THE EFFECT of abolishing secret ballots." That's much more of an honest argument and it lets the reader know there is a nuance here, and maybe someone might have another take on this.

That would be more intellectually honest.

In fact, Politifact, when assessing a similar statement on Card Check by Sen. Arlen Specter decided what he was saying was "mostly true." But that's still not absolutely true, as Will would have well-meaning Free Press readers believe.