Not long ago we anonymously received a copy of the following press release from the National Labor Relations Board Professional Association union dated June 30:

The Battle To Prevent Another September Massacre at the NLRB

The National Labor Relations Board Professional Association, the union representing attorneys at the Board’s D.C. headquarters, is fighting to prevent another September Massacre. The “massacre” that the Union fears isn’t dozens of controversial decisions but a wave of unfair and discriminatory mid-year appraisals and reprisals against its members.

A new performance-appraisal program sparked this battle. Applying a “forced distribution” model like those popular with corporations like General Electric, the Board forced attorney ratings to fit a pre-established distribution. As a result, the Board’s staff attorneys were more or less equally divided into Exceptional, Commendable, and Proficient categories.

To get this predetermined distribution, Board managers unfairly tinkered with individual ratings. The resultant ratings “downgrades,” in many instances of attorneys long rated in the highest category, prompted grievances by more than one third of 45 staff attorneys.

In addition, because the NLRB’s “rank-and-yank” appraisal system had a discriminatory, adverse impact on the Board’s older female and disabled attorneys, the new system generated discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity office and a grievance of the new system’s discriminatory impact on the bargaining unit by the Union.

Board management’s response to the Union’s efforts has been anything but predictable. The NLRB’s lone Democratic member, Wilma Liebman, has not settled a single grievance and threatened reprisals against grievants and a Union officer. Meanwhile, Chairman Peter Schaumber, despite his conservative, pro-employer reputation, has cooperated with the Union to settle most of the appraisal grievances of the attorneys assigned to him.

The Union recently filed grievances against retaliatory conduct by Member Liebman and contacted Congress and the NAACP for help remedying discrimination at the Board.

Where do we begin?

First we chuckle at the notion that every Board attorney fits into one of three categories ("exceptional, commendable, and proficient"), as this ranking system leaves out any possibility that a Board employee does less than "proficient" work. Given the many decisions where the NLRB has been slapped down by appellate courts for faulty logic and abuse of discretion -- particularly in cases involving individual employees dissenting from union activity -- it would seem that a Board attorney could easily earn a ranking of "deficient" or worse.

Still, Liebman's apparent hypocrisy raises eyebrows. After years of carrying Big Labor's water and working to shove forced unionism down the throats of both employers and individual employees (and she apparently also views her quasi-judicial role to essentially include lobbying for Big Labor's coercive card check bill), Liebman suddenly finds the tables turned. The union activist now stands accused of threats, reprisals, and discrimination against employees by the very union officials that she has worked overtime to empower.

Meanwhile, these union bosses praise NLRB Chairman Peter Schaumber who Liebman has derisively referred to as a promoter of an "individual rights regime." (An individual rights regime? My lands - how positively awful!)

If we thought the situation would make Liebman more sympathetic to employee free choice and individual rights, the whole experience could be a nice little learning experience for her. But we won't hold our breath.

A group of Dana Corporation employees from Albion, Indiana, recently fought their way free of the unwanted United Auto Workers union capitalizing on a ruling won by the National Right to Work Foundation.

Further undermining what little credibility it may still have, the American Bar Association held its annual labor law conference and loaded up the agenda with another one-sided panel discussion to attack the concept of employee free choice.

For the 4th year in a row, ABA political hacks have pointedly refused to allow the perspective of employees who may, God forbid, not want a union to dominate their workplace. Once again, a hot topic at the conference was the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation's cases defending employees whose rights are abused during card check organizing drives.

And yet again, the ABA meeting planners refused to allow the perspective of workers or their Right to Work attorneys to be heard -- instead selecting speakers representing Big Labor and a small faction of squishy, union-boss-friendly management lawyers. (Of course, the views of the speakers were rejected by the NLRB in its recent Dana/Metaldyne ruling, and the views of Foundation attorneys were embraced. Just a technicality, I guess.)

The ABA's intellectual dishonesty continues to be an embarrassment to America's legal profession.

"Troubling." "Notorious." "Deeply disturbing." You would have thought that the sky was falling.

However, no, this is how some members of Congress feel about employees' right to vote out an unwanted union after a coercive "card check" unionization drive, as evidenced by today's Joint Subcommittee hearing regarding the National Labor Relations Board.

Dominating the hearing was talk about the National Right Work Foundation's Dana/Metaldyne victory, which won this right for employees. NLRB Chairman Robert Battista made an analogy that the right for employees to vote out and unwanted union after a card check was a way for them to "speak now or forever hold their peace."

Too bad for America's workers, many times it is only union and company officials that say "I do" to card check/neutrality agreements, and they are left without a say.

As union chief John Sweeney continues to whine over the National Labor Relations Board’s recent workers’ rights victories, Big Labor bosses are meeting with Democrat officials today to press for passage of the horribly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act.”

The Wall Street Journal covered the story, stating that labor officials from around the world have convened in Washington as part of a global push to make it easier for unions to corral workers into union ranks by imposing the “card check” instant organizing scam.

The card check instant organizing process is opposed by most Americans because it curtails employees’ freedom to choose whether or not to unionize and strips workers of the limited protections of a government-supervised secret ballot election.

For more information about the harmful affects of in-your-face card check schemes on employees, check out these studies conducted by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.

A leftist University of Florida history professor named Robert Zieger dutifully lapped up the AFL-CIO’s latest talking points and lambasted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for its rulings on a handful of high-profile cases this fall.

Of course, Zieger failed to acknowledge that George W. Bush’s labor board has actually done very little to correct the many atrocities of Bill Clinton’s NLRB – which increased union coercive power over employees, entrenched unions in workplaces without the majority support of employees, and allowed for the rampant misuse of forced union dues for politics.

National Right to Work Foundation Vice President Stefan Gleason responded to Zieger in this column at the Gainesville Sun:

Despite the histrionics of Zieger and others, Big Labor is indeed winning its overall war against employees who wish to remain union-free. And President Bush's NLRB has sadly been, for the most part, AWOL.

National Right to Work Foundation Staff Attorney Glenn Taubman had a letter to the editor in the Washington Post over the weekend concerning whining about the recent Dana/Metaldyne victory. He wrote:

These cases were brought by workers to protect their right to freely choose or reject unionization. In both cases, employees were pressured to sign cards that were counted as "votes" for unionization. In both cases, the unions and the employers signed private deals apparently intended to result in unionization regardless of employee sentiment.

That said, it comes as no surprise that the NLRB majority in the case cited that the coercive "card check" union organizing scheme is "admittedly inferior" in protecting employee free choice.

A Washington Post piece about yesterday's NLRB protests by paid union professionals against recent NLRB decisions, including Right to Work's Dana/Metaldyne victory for employees, characterizes the decision repeating the doublespeak often trotted out by union officials:

"One of the board's decisions, issued Sept. 29, limits a key membership-building technique..."

Not to mention the fact that in the underlying cases 35% and 50% of employees respectively signed petitions for an election to toss out the unwanted United Auto Workers union as soon as it was recognized! Perhaps a "key involuntary membership building" scheme would be a more accurate characterization.

This article did not recognize that these challenges to abusive "card check" organizing were employee driven, and would've been well served to add this perspective.

And speaking of which, you can read more about Dana/Metaldyne in the cover story of the latest Foundaiton Action, available hot off the presses here.

National Right to Work attorneys' recent victory for employee free choice at the NLRB was the topic of much debate at a meeting of the pro-forced unionism American Bar Association, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Union partisans typically condemned the newly established rights for employees. Once again, however, the meeting attendees did not get to hear from any representative from the National Right to Work Foundation, the group actually winning the main cases at issue and leading the charge to protect employees from "card check" organizing abuses.

Despite the hue and cry of union officials, the actions of the Bush NLRB to correct literally dozens of activist, pro-compulsory unionism rulings issued by the Clinton NLRB have been limited, delayed, and sparse. The Bush NLRB has a lot of work left to do and little time to do it.

The AFL-CIO hierarchy has taken its latest beef with Right to Work attorneys' victory for employees up with the International Labor Organization (ILO). About the complaint, AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney says:

"The Bush NLRB is kryptonite for America's workers."

This is like Lex Luthor complaining that his kryptonite doesn't work well enough. While the recent Dana victory was an encouraging step forward for employee freedom, the Bush NLRB still has lots of work left to do.

And as we see everyday, compulsory unionism abuse is the real kryptonite for America's workers.