Employee Rights Act

The vast majority of union members never voted in favor of joining their union. Instead, they likely inherited the union representing them from previous employees who have either passed on, retired or left for another employer. 

A recent analysis of data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) determined that less than 10 percent of union members actually voted to join the union that represents them. 

The Employee Rights Act addresses this by mandating that unions be re-certified every three years.

What it does: The Employee Rights Act requires that every unionized workplace have a supervised secret ballot election every three years to determine whether employees want to continue to be represented by any incumbent union.

Support: 84% of households were strongly/somewhat supportive. 83% of union households were strongly/somewhat supportive.

Background: Once a workplace is unionized it is nearly impossible for employees to decertify a union. As a result, millions of unionized employees work in union shops where they have never had the opportunity to vote on whether or not they want to remain represented by that union.
This provision is especially important in light of the NLRB's recent proposal to shorten the time period for elections where employees have insufficient time to formulate an informed vote.

Research Methods: The Center for Union Facts tabulated the number of employees who voted in favor of joining a union in elections where the union won from 1964 to the present based on the National Labor Relations Board's annual reports (Table 14, RC 1-union elections; Total Votes cast in elections won; votes for unions).

For each year, we then estimated the proportion of those employees who are still in the same job based on job tenure data for unionized employees from the Current Population Survey tenure supplement. Multiplying that proportion by the number of “yes” votes yields the number of current employees from each year who've been at their current employer long enough to have voted for the union. As a percentage of the total unionized workforce, 9.25 percent of currently unionized workers voted in favor of joining the union representing them.