Obama Removes Craig Becker FRom NLRB

FROM: THE DAILY CALLER

On Thursday President Barack Obama officially rescinded former Service Employees International Union and AFL-CIO attorney Craig Becker’s nomination to serve on the National Labor Relations Board. The move shapes up as the latest in a growing line of Republican victories surrounding the board.

The NLRB is the federal agency that until recently opposed the Boeing Company’s move to opening a new assembly plant in the right-to-work state of South Carolina.

The board has since dropped its complaint against the aircraft manufacturer, but for months parroted union allegations that Boeing’s South Carolina production line was the product of retaliation against International Association of Machinists workers in the state of Washington.

While serving as a March 2010 recess appointee to the board, Becker has faced criticism for being too radical. The NLRB has made several moves since then that broke new ground in the degree to which they favored union positions — including moves to shorten the time-frame for workplace unionization elections, force employers to display pro-union posters in workplaces, and allow unions to section off workplaces in order to unionize them slowly in smaller “micro-unions.”

When news broke that Becker’s nomination had been rescinded, Fred Wszolek of the Workforce Fairness Institute had harsh words. “Good riddance,” Wszolek said. “Craig Becker will not be missed.”

House Education and Workforce committee chairman Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican, told The Daily Caller that Becker’s absence will be a net positive for America. “A victory on behalf of America’s workers and employers,” Kline said in an email.

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, asked President Obama ten months ago to rescind Becker’s nomination.

“I oppose the nomination of Craig Becker absolutely,” Enzi said in a February 2011 statement. “Over the past ten months, Mr. Becker has made his intention and bias clear. The NLRB is meant to be an impartial authority ensuring organizing freedom in the workplace, not a politicized institution bent on increasing unionization rates at the cost of American jobs. Last year, Mr. Becker was appointed against the will of the Senate. This year, I urge President Obama to work with Senators to identify a replacement nominee.”

U.S. Chamber of Commerce labor policy specialist Glenn Spencer told TheDC that, like Enzi, most senators easily comprehended the message that Becker’s 2009 nomination sent to American businesses.

“Using government as an agent of union activism was never a strategy for economic growth,” Spencer said, “and Becker’s failure to win confirmation shows that a majority of Senators understood that.”

In May TheDC uncovered a group of Harvard Law Review articles in which Becker advocated for government control over the flow of capital.

Reacting to those articles at the time, Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson told TheDC that Becker’s interpretation held that “labor unions can’t possibly succeed unless you guarantee their success.

In his reading of the law, any notion of workers who choose to collectively bargain sitting down with their employer and working out a deal is gone.”

A spokeswoman for the NLRB has not responded to a request from The Daily Caller about President Obama’latest move.

Obama NLRB Eliminates Secret Ballot Elections

From: Big Government.com

Outgoing NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman and the of the Obama Appointed NLRB Board members, Craig Becker & Mark Pearce, voted to eliminate secret ballot election protections. Now, when employers make secrets deals with a union bosses agreeing to recognize a union without allowing his employees a secret ballot vote; employees no longer have the right to force an NLRB secret ballot election and allow workers to decide if they want the union or not.

Unable to pass EFCA, Card Check Forced Unionism, through a Democrat-controlled congress, Obama is paying off Big Labor through his handpicked NLRB Board. He is doing all this at the expense of worker freedoms and worker paychecks. And, the NLRB Decision is applied retroactively to bar even elections that have already been held but not counted.

Employees can now be forced to pay for an undisclosed arrangement between employers and labor union bosses without having the right to put it to a secret ballot election.


This is particular heinous in non-Right To Work states where employees are forced to pay union dues and fees regardless of the fact that they did not want the union. The NLRB’s actions again prove why the National Right To Work Act needs to be passed. Then, every American will have the freedom to withhold his paycheck from union bosses if they choose.

Now Obama's NLRB tells a church school it's not religious enough

From: Washington Examiner

It's not enough for President Obama's National Labor Relations Board to target the Boeing plant in South Carolina. Now the NLRB thinks it can tell a church school when it's not religious enough.
 
Most people have heard by now of NLRB's unprecedented decree that Boeing Co. cannot build a new airline production facility in South Carolina.

But Obama's NLRB is also claiming the authority to dictate labor policies and order union elections at Catholic universities if they are not religious enough.

St. Xavier University was founded in 1846, the oldest Catholic school in Illinois. Its corporate member is a Catholic body with the "powers for the governance of" St. Xavier, that "links the University to the [Catholic] Church and makes it an officially recognized member of the Church."

St. Xavier's Board of Trustees must have at least four nuns from the order that founded the school, and, according to its bylaws, its governing body must "ensure [St. Xavier] continues its educational and religious mission."

After quoting these sources and many others, NLRB's regional director concluded in true Orwellian fashion that "the evidence establishes" that St. Xavier is "a secular educational institution or university."

To support this astounding conclusion flying in the face of the facts (not to mention common sense), NLRB claimed a 1979 Supreme Court affirms this authority.

Yet that case -- NLRB v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago -- actually says the complete opposite of what Obama's NLRB claims.

In an instance of deja vu, the Supreme Court in Catholic Bishop considered a challenge to an NLRB order asserting authority over lay teachers at Illinois Catholic high schools. (Sound familiar?)

NLRB claimed that it had no authority over a church but that it possessed power over church-related bodies that are not purely religious, such as schools. The court considered whether the National Labor Relations Act granted NLRB such power.

Noting the religious mission of Catholic schools, the Supreme Court declared, "Good intentions by government ... can surely no more avoid entanglement with the religious mission of a school" than legislation the court previously struck down as unconstitutional violations of religious liberty.

Turning to the facts of that case, the court reasoned, "The church-teacher relationship in a church-operated school differs from the employment relationship in a public ... school. There is no escape from conflicts flowing from [NLRB's] exercise of jurisdiction over teachers in church-operated schools and the consequent serious First Amendment questions that would follow."

The court then noted that nothing in the law's language suggested NLRB has power over any church-affiliated organizations. The court invoked one of the most basic principles of American law, that a federal statute "ought not to be construed to violate the Constitution if any other possible construction remains available."

Accordingly, the court held that federal law did not give NLRB the power it was claiming, so the court need not consider whether to strike down that provision. Instead, it held NLRB lacked any legal jurisdiction to judge the schools' religiosity, and vacated NLRB's order.

The New NLRB: Boeing Is Just the Beginning

The New NLRB: Deciding what state you can open a business.

From: National Review Online

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) raised a lot of eyebrows by filing a complaint against Boeing for opening a new plant in a right-to-work state. But that action is just the beginning of the board’s aggressive new pro-union agenda. An internal NLRB memorandum, dated May 10, shows that the board wants to give unions much greater power over employers and their investment and management decisions.

Under current NLRB rules, companies can make major business decisions (like relocating a plant) without negotiating with their union — as long as those changes are not primarily made to reduce labor costs. For example, a business can unilaterally merge several smaller operations into one larger facility to achieve administrative efficiencies. Companies only have to negotiate working conditions, not their business plans.

The NLRB apparently intends to change that. In the internal memorandum, the board’s associate general counsel, Richard Siegel, asks the NLRB’s regional directors to flag such business-relocation cases. Siegel explains that the Board is considering “whether to propose a new standard” in these situations because the chairman of the NLRB, Wilma Liebman, has expressed her desire to “revisit existing law in this area” by modifying the rule established in a case called Dubuque Packing.

Apparently, Liebman did not like having to apply the Dubuque Packing rules in a recent case involving the Embarq Corporation and the AFL-CIO. The NLRB decided that under the Dubuque Packing rules, Embarq did not violate the National Labor Relations Act by refusing to bargain with the union over its decision to close its call center in Las Vegas (a right-to-work state) and relocate that work to its call center in Florida (also a right-to-work state).

The Persecution of Boeing

From: National Review Online

H. L. Mencken defined puritanism as the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. The National Labor Relations Board is haunted by the fear that a company somewhere might be creating jobs with a nonunionized work force.

Boeing has run afoul of that fear by investing more than $1 billion in a new plant in the right-to-work state of South Carolina. With only the flimsiest legal justification, the board wants to force Boeing to reverse course and locate the facility with its current operations in Washington State, where its workers are unionized.

The NLRB’s claims are laughable on their face, although Boeing — trying to run a business in a highly competitive global market — can be forgiven for missing the joke. The board accuses Boeing of “interfering with, restraining, and coercing” its union employees in the exercise of their rights by making a thoroughly understandable business decision.

This is putting not a thumb, but a fist on the scale in favor of the unions. A writer at the liberal The New Republic says it “may be the most radical thing the Obama administration has done.” It’s an attempt to keep companies with the misfortune of operating in union-heavy states in perpetual thrall to organized labor.

The CEO of Boeing stands accused of saying the company could ill afford the “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.” In a memo, paraphrased in the NLRB complaint, Boeing management said it wanted “to reduce vulnerability to delivery disruptions caused by work stoppages.” What’s notable about these statements is that they are so obvious, they should go without saying.

Boeing and the Radical NLRB

From: The Daily Caller

Several Republican senators penned an open letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday calling on him to immediately rescind National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) nominations for Lafe Solomon and former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) general counsel Craig Becker. Their request comes as the NLRB is leading a charge against Boeing for planning to open a non-union factory in South Carolina.

Republican South Carolina Sens. Jim DeMint and Lindsey Graham, along with the other Republican senators who signed the letter, believe Becker and Solomon seek to support labor union bosses at the expense of workers. “The NLRB, at the behest of Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, has taken unprecedented legal action against The Boeing Company to prevent it from expanding productions into South Carolina, a state that assures workers the freedom not to join a union as a condition of employment,” the letter reads. “We consider this an attack on millions of workers in 22 right-to-work states, as well as a government-led act of intimidation against American companies that should have the freedom to choose to build plants in right-to-work states. If the NLRB prevails, it will only encourage companies to make their investments in foreign nations, moving jobs and economic growth overseas.”

Becker and Solomon were both recess-appointed to the NLRB and, in Becker’s case, all 41 Republican senators wrote Obama to urge him not to make Becker’s recess appointment after the Senate rejected his nomination the first time around. Solomon has not yet appeared before the Senate for confirmation.

NLRB continues its crusade to unionize America

From: American Thinker

Fresh off its decision to ask an administrative law judge to stop Boeing's move to step up production in South Carolina because Boeing cited its wish to lower the risk of suffering more strikes, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is stepping up its game.

Now Obama's NLRB is planning on suing two states, Arizona and South Dakota, seeking to invalidate those states' constitutional amendments that prohibit card check. This is just the latest step in Obama's campaign to reward and empower unions (and their campaign piggy banks) at the expense of jobs and growth (see "Unions Still in the Driver's Seat" for a partial list)
The New York Times reports:

The Arizona and South Dakota constitutional amendments were promoted by various conservative groups worried that Congressional Democrats would pass legislation allowing unions to insist on using card check in organizing drives, meaning that an employer would have to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed pro-union cards. Under current law, private sector employers can insist that secret ballots be used when unions are trying to organize.

Unions like card check because the public voting allows them to see who supports unionizing and who does not. This transparency pressures workers to support union drives since their opinions will be public.