By Anya Sostek
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Last summer, nearly 70 percent of nurses at the Colonial Park nursing home in Harrisburg signed cards indicating that they wanted to join a union. But when it came time for the formal union election process a month and a half later, the unionization effort failed easily, 24 votes to 52.

The situation may seem counterintuitive, but it is not unusual. Both unions and businesses know that different voting methods can produce different final tallies during elections.

For that reason, both pro-union and pro-business groups are pushing changes to union voting procedures. The issue likely will be one of several discussed at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO's convention beginning today in Downtown Pittsburgh.

Union organizers are seeking to expand "card checks," in which employees indicate their wishes by signing their names to cards, while pro-business groups hope to eliminate them in favor of secret ballots.

Although card checks were relatively rare 20 years ago, they now are used in most large-scale organizing drives -- such as last year's unionization of 5,000 janitorial workers in Houston and 16,500 workers for the Cingular cell phone company.

Stewart Acuff, organizing director for the national AFL-CIO, said 80 percent of union members join through card checks and other methods that avoid the formal National Labor Relations Board election process. NLRB elections have strict voting criteria and require secret balloting. Unions are successful a little more than half the time in formal NLRB elections, vs. nearly 80 percent with card checks.

"NLRB elections just don't work," said Mr. Acuff. "We prefer card check because people can do it off premises, can do it in their homes, can do it without the employer looking over their shoulder."

Under the National Labor Relations Act, however, it's not the union's decision: Private-sector businesses have the right to insist on a formal election. When unions vote by card checks, they must get the employer's permission to do so -- usually through something called a "neutrality agreement," where the business says that it won't interfere in the election.

A bill in Congress called the "Employee Free Choice Act" would change that requirement, allowing unions to use card checks at will. The bill has 212 co-sponsors in the U.S. House, but would likely be vetoed by President Bush if it passes Congress.

Union organizers support card checks because they say that formal elections offer employers too much opportunity to threaten and intimidate workers.

At the Colonial Park nursing home, union organizers say the company strategically targeted certain workers and threatened the security of their jobs.

"We at the union don't really have any cards," said Dan Engelhart, an organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Philadelphia. "They hold the deck. They control the whole thing."

In the case of Colonial Park, the 70 percent of workers who signed cards did so not because the company had agreed to card checks, but because signatures of at least 30 percent of eligible workers are required to force an NLRB election.

Not surprisingly, businesses have an alternate explanation for differences in card check and secret ballot voting.

Administrators with Grane Healthcare, the Pittsburgh-based company that owns Colonial Park, did not return phone calls , but businesses generally say that workers often are intimidated by their co-workers into signing the cards in the first place. When they have a chance to privately vote their conscience, they say, some will prefer not to join the union.

"The reason that the law is set up with secret ballots is that it's too easy to compromise someone's intention," said Rick Berman, president of the Center for Union Facts.

Mr. Berman, who in the past has headed interest groups critical of minimum wage increases and "obesity myths," founded the Center for Union Facts in February. Last month, the group took out full page ads in national newspapers advocating secret ballots for all union elections.

Mr. Berman supports a bill, introduced by Rep. Charlie Norwood, R-Ga., which would eliminate the option to go outside the NLRB election process and use card checks.

Even though it is technically the company's decision to use the card checks, Mr. Berman said companies often are bullied into the decision to sign a neutrality agreement. He referenced the strikes and pressure from political and religious leaders organized by SEIU in the unionization, by card check, of the 5,000 janitors in Houston.

"Companies typically don't agree to have their workers unionized," said Mr. Berman. "The only reason that an employer would do that is if they have some negative incentive .... They have all sorts of ways of intimidating a company into agreeing to neutrality."

The tactics that Mr. Berman calls intimidation are now the lifeblood of union organizing, said Gabe Morgan, director of SEIU Local 3, which covers Pittsburgh.

"If you look at any successful union organizing campaign, even the board ones, it looks a lot like the civil rights movement," he said.

Mr. Morgan underscored the importance of card checks to today's unions -- not just for physical ballot reasons -- but because they represent that a company will work with a union.

"The real issue is not about which process you use to vote," he said. "The issue is about employers being willing to bargain in good faith. What a card check agreement is, is where, at the end of the day, they say, 'Here's a process that we can agree to.' "