Mr. Chairman, members of the Subcommittee on Employer-Employee Relations, I am pleased and honored to be here today. Thank you for your kind invitation. My name is Clyde Jacob, and I am a partner with the Jones Walker law firm in New Orleans, Louisiana. For almost 25 years, my practice has been devoted to labor and employment law. My clients have included Fortune 500 companies and small, local businesses, and my work in the labor law field has taken me around the country as well as overseas.

Union authorization cards begin the legal process under section 9 of the National Labor Relations Act for a labor union to represent an appropriate unit of employees at an employer. Union representatives or employees of a company solicit employees to sign cards, and once 30% of the employees in an appropriate unit sign cards, a labor union has the right to invoke the legal machinery of the Act, petitioning for a secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), usually within 50 days or less. While the cards are an integral part of the legal representation process, they should not be the final arbiter of employee representation. The circumstances surrounding the solicitation of cards does not ensure a credible process, free of pressure and intimidation, as do government conducted secret ballot elections.

Let me relate to you a case example that I believe shows why legislation to require secret ballot elections is necessary to ensure a private, uncoerced, and credible legal process for employees to choose whether or not they genuinely want to be represented by a particular labor union.

In May of 2000, a new union federation was formed and headquartered in Houma, Louisiana, and it was called Offshore Mariners United or OMU. With the help of the AFL-CIO's Department of Corporate Affairs, Center for Strategic Research, the OMU planned to organize the vessel personnel who work on the boats which service the offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. The campaign lasted for over three years, ending this past summer when OMU closed its offices. Union cards were solicited from the employees of the various boat companies, and one company, Trico Marine Services, Inc., became the principal target of the organizing campaign. Employees of Trico Marine reported to the company of abusive, coercive, and intimidating tactics in the card solicitation process. Let me share with you some of the voluntary reports which employees made about their experience in the card solicitation process which occurred throughout the Gulf South in small towns and rural communities.

Some employees, when solicited at their homes by union representatives, said, "No," to signing a card; yet, they reported repeated, frequent home visits by union representatives continuing to try to secure their signatures, and they complained to the company of this harassment. After 8 visits, one vessel officer in southern Louisiana had an arrest warrant issued against a union organizer. One employee reported that the union representatives exited their vehicle and approached his home with a video camera recording him, which he believed made him a marked man. A vessel captain reported that while he was stationed in Brazil, union representatives visited his home, knocked on his door, and when his wife, who was home, did not answer, proceeded to circle the home for an extended time looking into and knocking on the windows. In an unfortunate incident, a fight broke out between a vessel officer and a union organizer at the officer's home. In another unusual event, union organizers in a recreation boat trolled next to company vessels with a 6 foot blonde female passenger in a bikini, beckoning mariners like a siren to invite her boat over, at which point union authorization cards were solicited. Employees volunteered that they signed cards just to stop the pressure and harassment. One has to ask whether cards solicited under such conditions can, with confidence, be considered reliable indicators of employee sentiment on which to base union representation.

Untrue statements were made by union representatives to persuade Trico employees to sign authorization cards. In an ironic twist, a representation was made to employees to go ahead and sign cards, and if they later changed their minds, they could vote differently in the election. Of course, the OMU had no intention of gaining representation through a NLRB conducted secret ballot election. Instead, its plan was to gain representation through obtaining union cards from a majority of the employees and forcing the company through public pressure and harassment to recognize the OMU. This plan came to light when the OMU offered the company a neutrality agreement, an agreement under which the company would facilitate the union's organizing effort. It was entitled, "Constructive Resolution Agreement," and it insisted upon representation based solely on union authorization cards from a majority of the employees.

Trico Marine would not sign the neutrality agreement, which relied only on authorization cards for legal recognition. As a consequence, it faced all manner of attacks on the corporation, including the disruption of its annual meetings and the meetings of its customers, veiled threats to customers and suppliers, attempts to hurt the company within the investment community, the disruption of trade shows and conventions at which the company attended or was featured, and threatened secondary boycotts of the company's subsidiaries in other parts of the world, including Norway, Nigeria, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. If the NLRA would have permitted, Trico would have filed its own petition for a secret ballot election to resolve the matter and end the protracted harassment. Unfortunately, the law provides a very limited circumstance for this to occur.

A serious problem with reliance upon union authorization cards as a method of gaining legal representation under the NLRA is the possibility of forged employee signatures on the cards. There was never any confirmation that this occurred during the OMU's campaign in the Gulf South; however, this has been an issue in other cases, and I have referenced reported decisions on this. Dayton Hudson v. NLRB et al., 79 F.3d 546; Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corp. v. NLRB, et al., 732 F.2d 1288, 1293 (6th Cir. 1984); Perdue Farms, Inc. v. NLRB, et al., 927 F. Supp. 897 (E.D. N.C. 1996), rev'd on other grounds, 108 F.3d 519 (4th cir. 1997).

While I have discussed the pressure, intimidation, and distortions that can accompany the card signing process, there is another factor that contributes to the high risk to employee rights of relying upon union cards as a method for determining legal representation -- it is the refusal of labor unions to return cards when employees have sought their return. This problem is further compounded by the law under the Act which does not require a union to return a requested authorization card. Attached as Exhibit No. 1 to my testimony is a letter from the NLRB's 15th Regional Office to an offshore vessel employee, whose name has been redacted, acknowledging that it has no authority to require the return of his signed union card, nor to rectify misrepresentations (1).

In my experience, the risk of harassment, intimidation, and forgery in the card solicitation process is too substantial to permit union cards to be a method under the Act by which a union can establish legal representation. The quiet, sober, and private atmosphere of the voting booth should be the preferred method in all cases.

Union authorization cards play an integral role in our nation's labor laws on union organizing. They begin the representation process -- but they should never be the end of that process -- that should always belong to the democratic secret ballot. Legislation is definitely needed to ensure this.

Thank you for the opportunity to address the subcommittee. I would respectfully request that my written testimony be included in the record, and I would be glad to answer any questions.

(1).  Exhibit No. 1 is attainable in the permanent archives.