In The Washington Examiner, Right to Work President Mark Mix takes on the Federal Election Commission's lax oversight of suspicious Big Labor political fundraising:
Imagine the outcry if McDonalds executives demanded that franchise owners collect “voluntary” contributions totaling $25,000 for the company’s Political Action Committee (PAC) from employees at every restaurant.
What if the fast food titan’s headquarters followed up with a threat - pay us, or face a $37,500 fine? Do you think this heavy handed scheme would raise a few eyebrows at the Federal Election Commission (FEC)?
Replace “McDonalds” with “SEIU” in that description and you’ve got a pretty good idea of Big Labor’s latest political fundraising strategy. To meet their ambitious fundraising targets, Service Employees International Union bosses are now threatening to fine any local affiliate that doesn’t meet its PAC contribution requirements.
NLRB's decision to revisit pro-worker precedent highlights Board Member Craig Becker's refusal to recuse himself despite massive conflicts of interest
Washington, DC (September 1, 2010) – In a decision dated August 27 but only released yesterday, three members of the National Labor Relations Board granted review of a landmark 2007 case in which the federal labor board granted employees the right to demand a secret ballot election to remove an unwanted union within 45 days after the union obtained monopoly bargaining status through the coercive card check process.
In late 2009, union lawyers initiated a strategy to overturn the Dana Corp. decision won by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys. In a series of cases nationwide, union lawyers asked the NLRB to revoke the new protections to workers swept into union ranks through card check forced unionism, and now three members of the Board – all former union lawyers themselves – have agreed to consolidate two of those cases in a review of Dana.
As the dissenting Board members point out, workers across the country have already used Dana decertification elections to kick out unwanted unions, demonstrating the unreliability of card check instant organizing campaigns. Workers frequently sign union authorization cards due to union organizers’ intimidating tactics or even outright lies about what signing a card means. To remove the limited protection of the secret ballot in these cases – as the Obama NLRB appears set to do – would deny workers the ability to vote according to their conscience and remove an unwanted union from their workplace.
In an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner, National Right to Work President Mark Mix discusses the threat to real education reform posed by teacher union bosses in Washington, DC.
Just a few weeks ago, Samuel Johnson’s centuries-old observation that a man’s knowledge he is to be hanged “concentrates his mind wonderfully” seemed quite applicable to Washington Teacher Union (WTU) President George Packer.
Of course, no one was threatening Packer with the rope or any of its modern-day equivalents when they agreed to a new contract in late June making it significantly easier for D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to dismiss ineffective teachers.
But when he signed off on the new contract, Packer, whose WTU is a subsidiary of the mammoth American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, faced a Big Labor boss’s worst nightmare, a rapid decline in the number of employees forced to pay to his union dues or fees in order to keep their jobs.
As recently as 2003, there were roughly 5,000 D.C. teachers who had to accept the WTU as their monopoly-bargaining agent and pay union dues or fees as a job condition. Today, there are barely 4,000. Despite the best efforts of Packer and AFT union czarina Randi Weingarten, that number is set to drop still further over the next few years.
Over the years, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have provided free legal aid to teachers whose rights have been violated by compulsory unionism. Read about some of these cases here, here, and here.
Today, House Republican leader John Boehner called on President Barack Obama to veto any controversial legislation that passes during the post-midterm election lame-duck Congressional session. One of those controversial bills is the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill.
As Right to Work Foundation legal director Ray J. LaJeunesse details in the Spring 2010 issue of the Texas Review of Law & Politics journal, this draconian bill's many injustices.
Regarding the bill's provision to strip workers of their rights to a secret ballot election and opening them up to intimidating "home visits":
...the absence of a formal election process works an obvious unfairness, facilitates intimidation and deception of workers, and runs contrary to the American tradition of secret ballots and the freedom to vote in privacy. The United States Supreme Court has already spoken to the issue, recognizing that “secret elections are generally the most satisfactory—indeed the preferred—method of ascertaining whether a union has majority support.”
There also is a serious question whether EFCA will unconstitutionally deny employers and employees their free speech rights... Because there would be no open campaign leading up to a secret-ballot election, EFCA would eliminate open debate, thus curtailing the speech rights of employers and individual employees opposed to the union.
Mandatory governmentally-imposed binding interest arbitration... runs afoul of various provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
Moreover, in requiring governmentally-imposed arbitrators to dictate contract terms, EFCA would unconstitutionally take the property of employers and give that property to their employees (as wages, for example) for a non-public use, in violation of the takings clause...
And finally, regarding the lopsided nature of the penalties imposed on job providers:
These drastic new penalties for unfair labor practices that apply to employers but not to unions raise concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and may violate the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.
These one-sided changes in the NLRA’s remedial scheme would adversely affect employees as well as employers. With the Damoclean sword of punitive remedies looming, employers faced with union organizing campaigns will be more likely to gag themselves to avoid unfair labor practice charges by unions, thus depriving employees of the “information opposing unionization,” which they have an implicit “right to receive” under NLRA section 7, and which is necessary to make an informed and free choice about whether to support unionization or not.
As LaJeunesse clearly explains, the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill certainly "presents serious legal and policy issues" indeed.
In her latest syndicated column, Michelle Malkin highlights the National Right to Work Foundation's request that Attorney General Eric Holder investigate National Labor Relations Board Member Craig Becker for violating his ethics pledge by participating in cases involving his former employer, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
As Malkin notes, Becker's weak standard for recusal rests on a faulty distinction between the national union and its local affiliates.
It's no surprise that Becker now refuses to hold himself accountable for the ethics pledge he himself signed in April. As the past two years have taught us, Team Obama's operational slogan is: Rules are for fools. The contractual ethics commitment states: "I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts." Yet, Becker has participated in numerous NLRB cases involving the SEIU and its affiliates -- and is parsing the definition of "former employer" by arguing that local SEIU chapters are "separate and distinct legal entities" that don't fall under the ethics rules.
The National Right to Work Foundation, which has fought both national and local SEIU officials in court on behalf of rank-and-file workers' rights, eviscerates Becker's lawyerly blather. SEIU's own constitution considers local affiliates "constituent subordinate bodies" of the national union, the foundation notes. "Moreover, in 2009 over 85 percent of the SEIU's receipts came from a per capita tax on the locals' membership dues and fees. The national union even has the power to assume control over its locals if they do not conform to International policies."
Malkin also rightly ties Becker's installment onto the federal labor board into the Obama Administration's pattern of granting special privileges and hidden paybacks to the union bosses.
Read Malkin's entire column here and more from our Freedom@Work blog on Craig Becker here and here.
The Wall Street Journal slammed Obama recess appointee Craig Becker this week for participating in cases before the National Labor Relations Board involving his former employer, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU):
In his few months at the NLRB, Mr. Becker, former associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union, has refused to recuse himself from most cases involving his former employer. This despite the fact that Mr. Becker signed the Obama Administration's vaunted ethics pledge, in which he promised to refrain for two years from participating in "any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer."
In true lawyerly fashion, Mr. Becker is now running for the loopholes, arguing that the SEIU proper is a "distinct legal entity" that is different from local SEIU unions. Having liberated himself from that legal barrier, Mr. Becker says he intends to continue judging disputes that feature local SEIU shops. He even convinced the NLRB's inspector general—who was asked to investigate one of the failure-to-recuse cases—to buy the separate legal entity line.
From a technical legal standpoint, SEIU locals may well be distinct from Mr. Becker's former employer. Yet the clear intention of President Obama's ethics pledge was to eliminate obvious political conflicts of interest. The example of a former SEIU lawyer like Mr. Becker sitting in judgment on cases featuring SEIU locals is Conflict 101.
No one understands better than Mr. Becker the deep organizational and financial ties between the SEIU and its locals, having been the attorney who crafted national legal strategies for use by SEIU locals everywhere. NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman (another Obama appointee) has applied a more rigorous and appropriate standard of recusal for herself in cases involving her former employer, the Teamsters.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is representing workers in several cases involving SEIU locals, sent a letter Monday requesting that the Department of Justice investigate whether Mr. Becker has violated his pledge. Let's hope Attorney General Eric Holder isn't as cavalier about that request as President Obama was with Mr. Becker's appointment.
