If you are a little confused about the janitors' strike at the University of Miami, you're in good company. As strikes go, this one defies the traditional model in which underpaid workers exhaust all alternatives and strike as a last resort for better pay, benefits and/or work conditions. Those issues may have been in play initially, but the janitors already have won a hefty and deserved pay raise and health benefits -- yet the strike continues.

Resolving some of the pay and benefit issues has made it easier to see this fight for what it really is. It is a power struggle between a union, Service Employees International Union, and the company, Unicco Services, over a procedural issue: how to determine if the workers want a union. On this question, the best way to get an accurate and fair determination of what the workers want is through a secret ballot administered by the National Labor Relations Board.

Therein lies the rub, and the reason this fight won't go away soon. The union has to initiate an NLRB-supervised secret election itself, or agree to one requested by Unicco. But SEIU wants a different kind of vote, a card-check election, in which workers sign pledge cards indicating their preference for a union.

Unicco prefers an NLRB election, but hasn't asked the NLRB for one. Each side believes that the election preferred by its foe gives advantages to the other side.

There may be some truth to these claims, but the best chance for fairness consists of taking an accurate count by secret ballot, a staple of our democratic system. Unfortunately, we're not likely to see a secret ballot anytime soon because each side is determined to batter the other into submission in the arena of public opinion.

That's too bad because if either side had requested and agreed to a secret ballot, the issue would have been resolved weeks ago.