The author posits that the typical election campaign involves the employer’s conduct of an adversarial campaign, during which it has unlimited access to the electorate throughout the workday while the union does not. Unions have sought to negotiate card check and neutrality agreements with employers as an alternative: the employer recognizes and bargains with the …

The authors posit that the principal impediment to unions winning NLRB-supervised elections is not that strategic advantages of employers but employees’ preferences and views, and that greater success of unions under neutrality agreements (78% vs. 51%) is attributable to (1) the hampering of all forms of employer expression and (2) the substitution of authorization cards …