Worker Advocate Launches Legal Task Force to Protect Indiana Right to Work Freedom

Law prevents union officials from extracting union dues from workers as a condition of employment

Washington, DC (February 2, 2012) – The National Right to Work Foundation announced today that it is launching a legal task force aimed at protecting Indiana’s newly-enacted Right to Work law.

Union officials publicly floated the idea of challenging the law in Indiana's courts before the law was even passed by the Indiana state senate.

Indiana is the nation's 23rd Right to Work state after the state senate passed the bill and Governor Mitch Daniels signed the bill into law on Wednesday.

Foundation attorneys have successfully defended state Right to Work laws in the past, including Oklahoma's. The task force has already examined reported union lines of attack and determined that Indiana’s Right to Work law is on sound legal ground.

"Union bosses want to undo what thousands of Hoosier citizens have worked hard for over the past decade," said Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Foundation. "Because union partisans cannot win the hearts and minds of Indiana's workers and voters, they seek to have the courts strike down Indiana’s popular Right to Work law for them."

Read the entire press release here.

Worker Advocate Blasts Obama Labor Board Rule Change

New rule would allow union bosses to ambush workers into forced-dues-paying union ranks

Washington, DC (December 22, 2011) – The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced new guidelines that give union organizers the upper hand over independent-minded employees in representation elections which will be implemented on April 30, 2012.

The new rules dictating how union organizing elections are conducted are designed to dramatically shorten the time individual workers have to share information with their coworkers about the effects of unionization. The new rules were rushed out before former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) lawyer and Obama recess appointee Craig Becker's NLRB term expires, at which point the NLRB will drop to two members and no longer have a quorum necessary to take any action.

Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Foundation – the nation's leading advocate for workers who suffer from the abuses of compulsory unionism – released the following statement in the wake of the NLRB's announcement:

"Christmas came early for Big Labor as the Obama Labor Board has once again given union bosses increased power to ambush workers into dues-paying union ranks.

Read the entire release here.

Transcript Shows SC Boeing Employees Kept in Dark about Labor Board Sham Settlement

Washington, DC (December 14, 2011) – National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) documents show that workers who had intervened in the Board’s high-profile case against Boeing were instead shut out of the entire process by which the case ended with Boeing agreeing to locate production of its 737 MAX plane in forced-dues Washington State.

With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, North Charleston Boeing employees Dennis Murray, Cynthia Ramaker, and Meredith Going, Sr. moved to intervene in the NLRB's unprecedented case targeting the company for locating production of some of its 787 Dreamliner airplanes in South Carolina, in part due to its popular Right to Work law. In Right to Work states, workers cannot be compelled to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.

An Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) originally denied the workers' request but was forced by the NLRB in Washington, D.C., to allow them to participate as partial intervenors in the case.

The transcript of the hearing ending the case in which NLRB, Boeing, and International Association of Machinist (IAM) union lawyers participated show that the workers were explicitly shut out of the proceedings. According to the transcript, the judge acknowledged that he had "finessed" the workers out of the process, which occurred without any notice to the workers.

Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work, issued the following statement in the wake of the hearing's revelations:

"The Obama Labor Board has set a dangerous precedent that will allow union bosses to bully job providers not to locate jobs in states with Right to Work protections for their workers, thus forcing more workers into union-dues-paying ranks, or face costly legal action.

"Boeing, IAM, and NLRB lawyers' transparent ploy to sweep the South Carolina workers under the rug once again shows that the Obama NLRB puts union boss priorities above the rights and well-being of individual employees.

Read the entire release here.

Obama Labor Board Kills Important Secret Ballot Precedent

Worker advocate denounces NLRB’s ruling to take away protection workers have against card check forced unionism

Washington, DC (August 30, 2011) – Today, Barack Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) overturned its Dana Corp. decision, in which National Right to Work Foundation attorneys secured for employees the right to challenge union card check organizing campaigns with a secret ballot vote.

Under the Foundation-won Dana decision, workers may collect signatures to request a secret ballot election during a 45-day window period following notice that their employer has recognized a union based on a card check organizing drive. The ruling is intended to counteract coercive practices frequently associated with card check, which allow organizers to bully or mislead employees into signing cards that count as "votes" toward unionization.

The NLRB overturned Dana just as President Obama-appointed NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman's term expired. Meanwhile, Obama-appointed Board Member Craig Becker, who co-authored a union brief in the original Dana case, refused to recuse himself from the case. Becker, a recess nominee, faces bi-partisan opposition to his confirmation in the U.S. Senate. One Board Member, Bryan Hayes, vigorously dissented and called the ruling a blatant roll back of employee freedom.

Any decertification votes that have been cast but not counted by the NLRB will now be discounted, thereby invalidating the voice of thousands of workers nationwide.

Read the entire release here.

Worker Advocate Denounces NLRB Rule Designed to Push Workers into Compulsory Unionism

National Right to Work Foundation President criticizes Labor Board’s decision to selectively publicize workers' rights

Washington, DC (August 25, 2011) – Today, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) implemented new rules governing the notification of employee rights in the workplace.

Until these changes, employers were required to post notices of workers' rights only if a violation of labor law occurred. However, the new rules require every employer to post incomplete information about employee rights online and in the workplace, even if they've never committed a violation or been accused of unfair labor practices. Meanwhile, union officials are not required to issue information about workers' rights to refrain from union membership or opt out of union dues.

Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Foundation – a charitable organization that provides free legal assistance to employees nationwide – made the following statement regarding the new rules:

"The NLRB's new rules are just the latest example of the Obama Labor Board’s biased approach to administering labor law.

"Just as the Obama administration promises to lessen the job-destroying weight of federal regulations, Obama's NLRB comes out with a new 'posting rule' to saddle every business – from ‘mom and pop' stores to IBM – with new mandatory posting requirements designed solely to grease the skids for more forced unionism."

Read the entire release here.

National Right to Work President Mark Mix appeared on "Your World with Neil Cavuto" to discuss Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis's efforts to undermine union transparency. Check out the video below:

Worker Advocate Urges Labor Board to Affirm Right to Object to Subsidizing Union Politics in Languishing Cases

Numerous cases before NLRB lay dormant as workers suffer from union policies designed to discourage objections to paying full union dues

Washington, DC (January 13, 2011) – The National Right to Work Foundation is urging the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to promptly resolve four cases almost identical to one decided last year by the Board as independent-minded workers wait for a resolution.

The Foundation – the nation’s premier advocate on behalf of workers who suffer from the abuses of compulsory unionism – scored a legal victory in August 2010 for workers who were subjected to a burdensome machinist union boss policy requiring employees to annually renew their objection to supporting union politics and other non-bargaining expenses or be converted back to paying full union dues.

The NLRB in Washington, DC determined that the machinist union’s annual objection requirement for workers who choose to refrain from union membership is illegal under Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court precedent upheld in Communications Workers v. Beck (1988).Under Beck, nonmember employees in states without Right to Work laws cannot be compelled to pay for union politics, lobbying, and member-only events.

In a letter penned by Foundation Vice President & Legal Director Raymond LaJeunesse to the NLRB, the Foundation asks that the Board apply their August 2010 decision to four virtually identical cases still pending before the Board.

Read the entire release here.

Today, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work was published in the Washington Times regarding today's U.S. Senate vote on Senator Harry Reid's Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill (S. 3991). Despite voters sending a clear message to Washington last month, it appears some pro-forced unionism senators didn't quite get the message:

If Mr. Reid cared one whit for what ordinary Americans think, he would respond to such electoral drubbings for his fellow Big Labor Democrats and GOP fellow travelers by backing away from federally mandated union-boss control over public-safety officers. Instead, he announced over the weekend that he will file for cloture and force a vote on this draconian bill on Wednesday. Among those voting will be 14 defeated or retiring senators who won't be back in January.

Federalizing union monopoly bargaining over public-safety employees would be ill-advised under any circumstances, but at a time when taxes are already poised to skyrocket and cities and towns across America are already struggling to get through the worst fiscal crisis in decades, Congress would have to be incredibly reckless to enact this harmful legislation.

By tipping the scales even further in favor of government employment growth over job growth, S. 3991 could damage the hopes of reviving America's private-sector economy. Moreover, as former Service Employees International Union second-in-command Anna Burger boasted, a federal public-safety union mandate would "create a national collective," i.e. monopoly, "bargaining standard for all [state and local] public workers."

Meanwhile, the Washington Post came out with a hard-hitting editorial against the bill:

...the Senate is about to take up a measure that might compound the financial predicament of state and local governments. Pushed by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act would require all states to give police and fire unions "adequate" collective bargaining rights - as determined by the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Unions could sue states deemed "inadequate" in federal court. Mr. Reid is trying to get this measure through the lame-duck Congress as a reward to the firefighters' union, which backed his reelection campaign. But it also enjoys support from several key Republicans. 

We share the sponsors' high regard for first responders. But this measure would trample long-standing state autonomy in public-sector labor relations, to no obvious national purpose. Of the 10 states with the lowest violent crime rates in 2008, three did not require collective bargaining for police and one, Virginia, forbids it for all public employees.

The bill could disrupt the law in both Virginia and Maryland, the latter of which lets counties decide whether and how to bargain with employees. The predictable result would be higher costs for employee contracts or legal bills - or both - at precisely the moment when cash-strapped states and localities can least afford them.

It's no wonder that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram declared today that "The Senate would do taxpayers a big favor by killing this bill."

Earlier this year, Gerry McEntee, president of the powerful AFSCME union, explained to The Hill newspaper that his union's futile $87.5 million political spending blitz in the 2010 Congressional midterm elections was intended to protect unpopular incumbent Democrats in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday, Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Foundation, was published in Investor's Business Daily exposing how union members actually overwhelmingly oppose their union bosses' political spending and agenda. From Investor's:

Top union officials spent an estimated one billion dollars of union dues in an attempt to re-elect incumbent Democrat politicians back into Congress during the 2010 midterm election cycle. But just how do the rank-and-file workers feel about that?

Despite the claims by union heads based in Washington, D.C., when it comes to the critical political and policy questions of our day, union officials do not espouse the beliefs of the rank-and-file members that they claim to represent...

The poll, conducted October 26-28 by long time pollster Frank Luntz, found that 60% of union members oppose their union bosses' record political spending in the midterm elections, viewing it a complete waste for union bosses to use union dues and treasuries to protect unpopular incumbent Democrat politicians in Washington, D.C.

The Luntz/National Right to Work poll (pdf) also found:

• A majority of union members even believe that union boss political spending should be used to “throw the bums out” instead, and half support replacing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with someone else while only 30% want her to remain Speaker;
• In light of Big Labor’s 2010 political spending spree, 59% of union membership would actually vote to replace their own “union leadership” if given a secret ballot election to do so;
• Half of union members view President Obama and the Democratic Congress’s healthcare reform bill as a failure, while only 37% view it as a success;
• Majorities also view the 2009 stimulus bill and the 2008 corporate bailouts as failures;
• Overwhelming majorities oppose future government spending and debt to rejuvenate the economy, and two-thirds of union members instead trust entrepreneurs, small businesses, and employers to lead America to better job growth.

But what should scare union bosses the most is that 80% of union members also support the Right to Work principle that would strip union officials of their government-granted special privileges to force workers into paying union dues or fees as a condition of employment. Perhaps next time union bosses should pause before spending massive amounts of workers' money to push an agenda that the workers disagree with.

Earlier this week, Mark Mix, President of National Right to Work, was published in the Washington Examiner warning about the threat the Police and Firefighter Monopoly Bargaining Bill (pdf), which just passed the House last week, poses not only public safety workers' rights, but also state and community budgets. As we noted before, public officials across the country are waking up to the fact that public sector forced unionism is behind the financial crises in their communities.

From Mark Mix's commentary:

(I)n the 22 states which prohibit forced union dues for government employees and most of which don’t authorize public-sector union monopoly bargaining, fewer than 30 percent of public workers are unionized. Not one of these 22 states was to be found on last month’s Business Insider’s list of the states “most likely to default.”

Business Insider ranked heavily unionized California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin as the worst default risks. And the Hirsch-Macpherson data shows that an average of 61 percent of public-sector employees in these nine states were under union monopoly bargaining -- 20 percent higher than the typical state.

In these nine worst default-risk states from 1999 to 2009, aggregate private-sector jobs fell by 4.2 percent, but heavily unionized state and local government jobs increased by 9 percent. Since annual state and local government employee compensation costs nationwide come to $1.1 trillion, or half of all state and local government spending, it’s not hard to see that the Big Labor-driven growth in government payrolls is a fiscal catastrophe for states like California, Illinois, and New Jersey.

...

But government union bosses are expecting to have the last laugh if fed-up taxpayers and their allies limit themselves to going after just bloated public-sector payrolls and unsustainable public pension plans, rather than root of the problem itself.

Laws empowering government union officials to negotiate the contract terms for all front-line employees at a public agency, even for those employees who want nothing to do with the union, are behind the messes in Sacramento, Springfield and Trenton. And laws that authorize the firing of public servants for refusing to pay union dues or fees to an unwanted union make matters even worse.

Long-term solutions to state budget crises will require addressing the core problems of union monopoly bargaining and forced union dues in the public sector.

Until then, hopefully the Senate will spare police officers, firefighters, and EMTs from forced union “representation” that will make budget matters worse for the numerous states that have already rejected it.

Read the entire Washington Examiner guest commentary by Mark Mix here.