Obama’s fundamental transformation project continues apace. Despite the fact that Congress rejected the DREAM Act, Obama implemented it by fiat a few weeks back. And now, despite the fact that Congress has rejected “card check,” a move by which unions can unionize workplaces without a true secret ballot election, Obama’s National Labor Relations Board has ruled in favor of card check anyway.
Via its newly-decided Lamons Gasket case, the NLRB eliminated the 2007 Dana Corp ruling, which the National Right to Work Foundation said protected workers from “coercive practices” union organizers often used to “bully or mislead employees.”
The Dana Corp. decision allowed workers the opportunity to request a secret ballot election within a 45-day window following a “card-check” organizing effort. Card-check organizing efforts are when union bosses try to get workers they’re targeting to sign cards indicating they want to have a union election.
What union bosses often neglect to tell workers is that if enough workers sign cards, there’s no need for an election. They’d already be unionized.
“The Obama Labor Board’s ruling to kill the Dana Corp. precedent that allows workers a secret ballot vote to kick out a union that gained control of the workplace in an abusive ‘card check’ campaign adds to an already exhaustive list of paybacks from the Obama Administration to Big Labor,” NRTW Foundation president Mark Mix said in a statement. “Big Labor and its allies have launched a full-scale assault on worker freedom and the Obama Administration is working tirelessly to appease them through bureaucratic means after they failed in Congress.”
This is a twin-gun assault on businesses, and on workers’ rights to decide not to join a union.
The NLRB also ruled in favor of micro-unions. These unions can now be formed even if a majority of workers in a workplace decide against unionizing, by allowing unions to target specific jobs or layers of management in a company.
Micro unions allow labor organizers to section off company employees by specific job descriptions. For example, if a union tried to organize a restaurant staff, leaders would target servers, busboys, dishwashers, cooks and hostesses separately.
Per the NLRB’s ruling, in non-acute healthcare facilities, like nursing homes and other long-term non-critical health facilities, unions can now target each layer of staff with organizing tactics.
These decisions constitute end-runs around Congress and direct assaults on workers’ and employers’ rights. Via micro-unions, Big Labor can now unionize workplaces in piecemeal fashion, squeezing out non-union workers while forcing businesses to deal with multiple and multiplying unions — all of which will probably eventually end up affiliated with the hyper aggressive AFL-CIO. As sops to Big Labor, they’re perfectly within Obama’s wheelhouse and among the very few promises he has made that don’t appear to have expiration dates.
The votes on both of these rulings and a third one that also came down Tuesday were 3-1, with the lone Republican on the board providing the lone dissenting vote in all three. There has been a call for that Republican member to resign, which would hobble the NLRB until a replacement for him can get through confirmation. But that may not be a viable strategy, since the rulings have already come down, and Obama recess appointed the last Big Labor plant on the board.
Damage done, it’s past time for Congress to move to defund the NLRB entirely. Surely there are enough right-to-work state Democrats who can be turned. Along with the EPA, the NLRB represents a grave threat to the economy within the federal bureaucracy. As threats to individual liberties, both the EPA and NLRB are two heads of the ever growing big government hydra that the president is using to fulfill his promise/threat to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America.
Yet another list of powerful reasons why small and micro-businesses choose to not grow or hire or expand.
One simple way to address card check organization efforts is to pass National Right to Work legislation. It’s not as much an issue if Unions bully their way into a workplace if individual employees have the right to not participate(pay union dues) in Union activities. Federal Employees have had this right for decades. Time to extend it to the private and all State employees.
Hi Bryan -
I’m sure I appreciate you writing about union issues – even though I don’t agree with the positions you’ve taken, I enjoy a lively debate.
However, I would like to correct several inaccuracies in your article and in the article you quote.
First of all, you say that card check was “rejected” by Congress, when in fact it passed the House 241 to 185, and had majority support in the Senate, but was killed by fillibuster.
Second, you mis-characterize card check as a “move by which unions can unionize workplaces without a true secret ballot election.” The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) gave no additional rights to unions. EFCA would have given *employees* the right to organize a union and choose a collective bargaining representative without their *employer* having the right to demand an election.
Third, you imply that the NLRB’s Lamons Gasket decision implements the card check provision of EFCA. This is just wrong. It removed a provision added under GW Bush which allowed employers the benefit of another lengthy delay (45 days) before they had to actually recognize the union their employees had requested, and they had accepted.
Lastly, the article you quote claims card-check involves employees signing “cards indicating they want to have a union election.” I wonder if you have ever seen a recognition card? They say very clearly that you wish “to be represented” by a union for the purposes of collective bargaining, not that you’d like to have an election. The notion that people are asked to sign documents they don’t understand is highly misleading, unless you assume that employees are stupid and unable to make their own decisions.
As for the rest of the article, I mostly disagree with your conclusions and political positions, rather than your statements of fact. Especially, I don’t see what “rights” you feel an employer is entitled to over the bargaining methods of their employees. This whole presumption suggests to me a kind of neo-feudalism in which an employer is lord and master of the workplace and the employees within it, not a modern society in which employer and employee are guaranteed the right to meet as equals and negotiate a contract on mutually agreeable terms.
For years I have heard why do you need a union when you have the dol, OSHA and EEOC. Really? I work in a place where one man runs the whole place. he is a freaking dictator. Promotes his favs who are some of the laziest workers here. He discriminates against women. He is always protected while workers get screwed. Once before employees tried to unionize they were all eventually fired. so please spare me.
Thank you. Very well said.