In the spring of 2009, labor relations faculty affiliated with four major university-based labor education programs collaborated on a study of their respective state laws mandating a majority authorization process for organizing employees in the public sector. The project was inspired by the national debate surrounding the proposed federal Employee Free Choice Act. Conventional reporting and discussion of the legislation has ignored the historical record of private and public sector workers organizing into unions without a government supervised election. According to Professor Raja Raghunath, “card check was a relatively common method of organizing workplaces until it was supplanted by National Labor Relations Board-run elections” in 1947.