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Earlier this semester, I wrote an opinion piece about how H.R. 800, S. 104 (The Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA) will restore democracy to the American workplace by allowing workers to choose for themselves whether or not they’ll join a union, without fear of intimidation, coercion, retributive action or illegal firing by their employers. With President-elect Barack Obama winning the election and a changing of guard in the U.S. Senate, the passage of the EFCA is rapidly becoming a hot-button topic of domestic policymaking.
I received an e-mail recently from Jack McKay, Director of Food AND Medicine – a local community organization – about a phone call he received. His wife Laura Millay answered the call and was asked if she would be willing to participate in a survey conducted by Promark Research Corporation – who described themselves as a “public research firm” in Texas. Millay agreed to take the survey.
After a few stock questions about the previous election, when she was asked, “Have you heard of the Employee Free Choice Act?” Millay said that she had and was asked to describe the bill in her own words. “It’s about supporting worker rights to form a union,” Millay told the surveyor. She also said she supports the bill. Immediately after indicating her support, the purpose of the survey was made apparent.
Millay was read a list of unattributed statements that “had been made” about the EFCA, and was asked if they made her more or less likely to support the bill. These statements included lines such as, “increased unionization would drive down the efficiency of the American workforce,” and “EFCA would significantly drive up the cost of doing business and kill American jobs by driving companies, including small business, out of the country.”
The issue with these sorts of leading questions is that through presenting unattributed “statements” as facts, you can convince people to believe anything. This display of immoral deception is a transparent scam. When asked for whom the survey was being conducted, the surveyor told Millay that she “didn’t have that information.” Promark is a for-profit corporation, which provides these “public research” surveys for a fee to whoever pays for them. If EFCA is being hotly contested by big-business on one side and supporters of worker rights on one side, it’s clear to see who benefits from this survey.
These types of “surveys” are referred to in the political world as “push polls.” According to McKay, this is a “classic push poll … where you make seemingly objective statements that are in fact very propagandistic. As a result, people are led to believe they’re looking at objective info. It’s a shameless yet effective way to move people away from supporting a particular position. Through what is essentially misinformation and deception, they’re trying to trick people into opposing the EFCA.”
Push polls can serve two purposes. The first is to test different lines of attack on a particular issue. By trying all these different “statements” and gauging the response, the surveyor is able to find out which one is the most effective in swaying the public. The other purpose is to drum up misleading statistics. I’m sure that whoever paid Promark to conduct this survey would love to be able to say, “90 percent of those who support EFCA change their mind after being presented with ‘the facts.’”
This survey is clearly an attempt by big business – which more than likely paid for the survey – to mislead the public. It is in the interest of corporations to keep their workers from unionizing, in order to maintain their control over a workforce that doesn’t have a voice. It is their job to make profits for their shareholders, and they can’t have a pesky union stand in the way of larger profit margins for the fat cats at the top. This misinformation campaign in only beginning, and it’s important that we all refuse to drink the Kool-Aid.
Mario Moretto is opinion editor for The Maine Campus.
