Two business groups, Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF) and Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), have released a web video game illustrating potential negative effects in the workplace should card check legislation become law.
The game, which is entitled “Card Checked,” takes place in a stylized setting after the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. The player encounters several scenarios as an employee of a tattoo parlor.
The fictional International Body Art Designers Union is trying to unionize the parlor using strong-armed tactics.
“Unfortunately, the game ends much like real life in that EFCA is expected to cost 600,000 jobs in the first year if passed,” AWF and ATR said in a release.
Some of the game’s highlights (most happen if you do not sign the union membership card) :
- A tie-dye wearing hippie tells the player that all the tattoo artists should unionize, quoting the French revolutionary motto, “Liberty, fraternity, and equality!”
- Scruffy union organizers who look more like mafiosos hang around the workplace pressuring employees to unionize.
- If the players refuses to sign the card, a co-worker tells him that “union thugs told me that something might happen to my cat Min Min.”
- If the player continues to refuse unionization the organizers smash the back window of his sports car. A slide says there have been 9,000 incidences of union violence since 1975.
- Once the store unionizes, union officials say they want to take dues from the player’s paycheck to buy a “private Learjet so we can go to posh resorts for, uh… important conferences on defending worker rights.”