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Abstract
Seventy years after passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the private sector union movement trends toward extinction. With memberships falling for a half-century, only 7.4% of private-sector workers remain unionized, fewer than the percentage when the NLRA passed in 1935. A major public policy issue faces the Congress, state legislatures, and federal and state labor boards. How is the ideal of employee free choice best actualized? The law is changing. From the union side one sees legislative attempts to win card majority recognition/certification rights and to avoid elections in which employers are free to campaign against unionization at all costs. And from the perspective of the NLRB's General Counsel and the NLRB's current majority, concerns for employee free choice create persistent questioning of long-assumed principles of card check recognition. For the private sector unions, especially, this issue may decide their ultimate fate as the percentage of represented employees shrinks toward the vanishing point.