Rigged

So you and I are members of a club - the Under Read and Unappreciated Bloggers of America (URUBA). URUBA has 100 members (the membership chairman is slacking, there's a sea of articulate but ineffectual potential members out there). Like all clubs, many members are content to go with the flow. They aren't interested in most club issues, they don't want to be an officer and don't particularly care who's running the club.

There's some important issues the club has to deal with coming up. Should we institute a pay wall, that would force our small collective, but free riding, audience to pony up for the privilege of reading our brilliant writing? Should we contract with a media company to get strategic URUBA mentions at Politico and RedState? How much would it cost us to get Larry King to do a "Brilliant!" blurb about us in his newspaper column?

The guy who's into structure stuff mentions that he was reading the bylaws last night when he couldn't sleep and they are quite clear that any vote requires a majority of all the members on the books, even the dead ones, not just a majority of those voting. The historian guy notes that we have never had more than 40 people vote on any issue since the club started up.

Our empire plans are screwed, the silent majority of our members are effectively no votes, dooming any action by the club.

Our political life is like URUBU club life, the majority of the citizenry isn't much interested in politics and doesn't vote. Were the URUBU bylaws used by local, state and federal governments for elections, government would shut down (I'm not saying that would be an altogether bad Idea in all instances).

Did you know that the URUBA election rules are used by the National Mediation Board, the federal agency that oversees railway and airline union issues? Does it surprise you that mostly non-unionized, larger, Delta Airlines, having absorbed mostly unionized, smaller, Northwest Airlines, is opposed to a proposed NMB rule change that would require a majority of only the employees voting in an upcoming unionization vote to favor union representation to certify the union?

I'm not a union fanboy, if I worked for Delta, I’d almost certainly vote against unionization, but still. From what I’ve read, Delta’s basis for opposition to the proposal is “we’ve done it this way for 75 years, there’s no reason to change now” A possibly cheap shot, but still valid, analogy: slavery was an institution, why change?

But, fair is fair. People opposed to the change point out that the current rule applies to union decertification votes. The rule should be changed for both kinds of vote. Goose and gander and all that.