by Phil Wilson The ambush election rule turned one on April 15. We now can look at the true impact of the rule unions wanted so badly to “level the playing field” in union elections. I’ve looked at the numbers and compared this last year to prior years. The bottom line: the rule’s impact has had no impact on what matters most to unions, total petitions and election victories. When the rule first went into effect the number of union elections spiked nearly 15% over the year prior (while the number of days to an election dropped by 1/3). While many of those elections were in small units, it looked like the rule was going to work exactly how unions hoped it would. With a full year under our belt it is now clear that the election spike was probably just petitions held back waiting for the new rule. By the end of the full year the number of petitions regressed back to the mean. In fact, this year the total petitions were actually lower than the prior year and about flat over the prior 4 years. Take a look: 
The total number of election in the April to April timeframe dropped by 66 over the prior year. If unions are looking for an ever-so-small silver lining there was a 1.7% increase in RC petitions over last year (36 more than the same period in 2014-2015). But as you can see by looking at the chart, the overall impact on election attempts has been zilch. What about election victories? The rule cut the average number of days to an election over the April to April period last year to 27 days (the median number of days to an election during that period was 24 days). That is down from around 36 days in prior years – a substantial drop. Historically unions win a higher percentage of shorter elections. However, the impact on union win rates is also surprisingly small: 
A seventy percent win rate is nothing to sneeze at, but the fact is unions have seen no improvement in their win percentage even as election periods have dropped by 1/3. Our experience consulting in elections since the rule went into effect (we’ve handled nearly 100 ambush elections) is the same. We win as much under the new rule as we did under the old. Not to brag, but we didn’t have a lot of room to improve. I am not surprised by either of these results. I never thought the ambush rule was going to dramatically increase the number of petitions or union victories. That’s because the ambush rule has no impact on the real problem unions face today: almost nobody is buying what they’re selling. Even shrinking the amount of time people have to learn about what unions offer (and the more you know the worse it looks) hasn’t moved the needle an inch. I don’t think the news is all bad for unions. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (much to the chagrin of unions) have energized huge numbers of people around traditional “union” issues like trade and income disparity. But unions are swirling the drain relying on the traditional union election model. The only thing keeping them afloat today is public sector membership, and even that is wilting on the vine. Whether unions can reinvent themselves fast enough to survive is a good question. What I can say is that government bailouts don’t seem to be the answer.
