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.
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