The House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions conducted a hearing yesterday on the Employee Free Choice Act, with Rep. George Miller of California leading the charge to change the way workers decide on whether or not to unionize.

Although Mr. Miller has introduced the bill before, now with the Democrats running Congress, it has a real chance of passing in the House when it comes up for a vote in the spring.

Under the system now in place, employees vote by secret ballot, much like all Americans do on Election Day. Majority rules, and the elections are strictly supervised by the independent National Labor Relations Board.

Labor nevertheless has grown to disdain secret ballot elections because today’s workers are more likely to reject union representation than their predecessors. Unions have seen their rank-and-file numbers decrease steadily. Union election success rates have dropped in the last five decades to about 50% today from about 70%. The number of elections held has also declined dramatically.

Instead of trying to make itself more attractive to today’s work force, organized labor has turned to the Employee Free Choice Act, which would eliminate elections and replace them with a “card check” system. This allows unionization after a majority of workers simply sign cards — out in the open — stating their intention to join a union. The method gives aggressive union organizers an opportunity to pressure employees, and workers often sign the cards just to get union organizers to leave them alone.

The proposed labor law would actually diminish liberty in the workplace. In addition to changing the election system, the proposal also would change the collective bargaining process for new contracts.

Under this bill, when a company is unionized through the card-check method, management and union officials would have only 90 days to settle a contract. After that, unions could compel companies into government-supervised mediation. If they still fail to reach an agreement in another 30 days, a government-appointed arbitrator would set the final contract terms.

Negotiations for new contracts almost always take longer than 90 or 120 days, which means that the practical effect of the legislation is that these arbitrators, who have no interest in the well being of the company, would be determining wages and benefits. The workers themselves also would lose out because they would not be allowed a ratification vote on the contract terms. The changes would satisfy only union bosses who welcome greater government intervention in setting private-sector wages and benefits.

In a press conference Tuesday to introduce the bill, Mr. Miller claimed that the act would give “workers the ability to more effectively bargain for fairer wages and benefits and working conditions.”

But it’s Orwellian for a movement based on “workers rights” to advocate for a legislative change that would take away a worker’s right to vote. Far from giving employees “free choice,” the act would give them no choice.

The bill has the backing of 232 co-sponsors, including nearly every Democrat in Congress. But Congress should keep in mind what recent union membership numbers really tell us.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest union membership numbers, labor lost 326,000 members last year, dropping overall unionization to 12% of the work force. Membership remained paltry in the private sector with only 7.6% of workers unionized. Even the relatively robust public-sector unions experienced a small membership decline and now represent 36.2% of public employees, down from 36.5% a year ago.

The hard truth is that the vast majority of workers —in both the private and public sectors — prefer not to have a union represent them. Objective public opinion polls have shown that workers view unions as too political, out-of-step with their concerns, and a relic of the industrial era. For example, an August 2005 Harris survey found that even 61% of union households rated organized labor’s performance negatively. Union members are also suspicious of labor’s card-check method. A survey of union members conducted by the Mackinac Center showed that a majority of workers thought that secret-ballot elections were fairer than the card-check system.

Workers routinely vote down unions in secret ballot elections not due to employer intimidation, but simply because they do not see a need for a union at their workplace. Today’s workers are more mobile, more independent, and feel more comfortable negotiating their pay and benefits directly with their employers.

The best way for unions to stop their membership decline is through wholesale internal reforms. These could include scaling back their political involvement, making unions far less bureaucratic and top-heavy, and ending compulsory dues.

The decline in union membership shows that workers are simply not interested in what labor currently has to offer. Labor leaders have only themselves to blame for that problem, not the law. If organized labor truly wants to rebound, it should focus on fixing its internal problems, not on pushing heavy-handed and undemocratic legislation.

Mr. O’Keefe is a labor and higher education policy analyst in Washington, D.C., and Ms. Blake is a writer at the Weekly Standard.