384
Opinion of Rehnquist, C. J.
Additionally, the Board's rationale gives short shrift to the Act's goal of protecting employee choice. Auciello Iron Works, 517 U. S., at 790-791. By ascertaining employee support for the union, a poll indirectly promotes this goal. Employees are not properly represented by a union lacking majority support. Employers also have a legitimate, recognized interest in not bargaining with a union lacking majority support. Texas Petrochemicals, supra, at 1062. The ability to poll employees thus provides the employer (and the employees) with a neutral and effective manner of obtaining information relevant to determining the employees' proper representative and the employer's bargaining obligations. See Curtin Matheson, 494 U. S., at 797 (Rehnquist, C. J., concurring); see also id., at 799 (Blackmun, J., concurring). Stability, while an important goal of the Act, see Fall River, supra, at 37, is not its be-all and end-all. That goal would not justify, for example, allowing a nonmajority union to remain in place (after a certification or contract bar has expired) simply by denying employers any effective means of ascertaining employee views. I conclude that the Board's standard restricts polling in the absence of coercion or restraint of employee rights and therefore is contrary to the Act.
Quite apart from the lack of statutory authority for the Board's treatment of polling, I think this treatment irrationally equates employer polls, RM elections, and unilateral withdrawals of recognition. The Board argues that having
protect against the potentially disruptive or coercive effects of polls equally in both situations. If anything, polling would seem more unsettling before the union is established. And in both situations, a poll serves the purpose of providing a neutral determination of the employees' support for the union, where such information is clearly relevant to employers in making legitimate decisions regarding their bargaining obligations under the Act. Moreover, to raise the bar to polling on the basis of the presumption of majority support would in effect make that presumption unassailable by denying employers the most effective, and least coercive, way to obtain information on the actual level of union support.
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