A new survey has found surprisingly strong support among union households for radically reforming the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and for requiring greater transparency by union leaders on their personal finances, as well as their management of union spending.
The survey of 805 registered voters, including 142 households (18 percent) with at least one union member, was conducted for Americans for Limited Government by pollster Kellyanne Conway and her firm, the polling co/Women Trend and has a 3.5 percent margin of error.
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Conway asked a series of questions concerning NLRB because the board sparked a national outcry earlier this year when it told The Boeing Company that it committed an unfair labor practice by constructing a new factory in South Carolina to build a third of the hundreds of 787 commercial airliners the firm expects to sell in coming years.
The new factory created more than 1,000 jobs in South Carolina. Boeing opted to build it after failing to reach an agreement with members of the International Aerospace and Machinists Union, which represents Boeing assembly line workers at its original Seattle facility, to build a second facility in Washington state.
Boeing has challenged NLRB’s ruling and the company has drawn support from Republicans and others who fear the board, which is dominated by union allies appointed by President Obama, is trying to intimidate other companies from relocating to right-to-work states.
Among union household respondents in Conway’s survey, 61 percent said they believe it is “a bad idea” to give the NLRB “exclusive power to officiate legal proceedings over private U.S. companies in its own court system separate from the regular one that governs most other legal matters in the United States.”
Fifty-nine percent of the union household respondents said it was a bad idea for the board to fulfull “the roles of investigator, prosecutor and judge in each of the cases that come before it.”
Sixty-three percent of the union household respondents said they would support having the NLRB funded entirely by unions instead of taxpayers through the federal government.
Another 56 percent of the respondents agreed that “a government board created in 1935 to address employment and labor issues probably is not as relevant or responsive to today’s concerns.”
And 79 percent of the respondents said they agreed that “a government agency that has flatly refused to comply with a Congressional command to provide documents is out of control and needs to be heavily reformed.”
The latter question was asked because NLRB has refused to turn over to Congress hundreds of documents concerning the Boeing case.
On the issue of union financial transparency, fully 94 percent of the respondents agreed that “union officials and executives should have to disclose their salaries and benefits connected to their official union office as a way of making them accountable to their members.”
The Obama administration early in its first year gutted financial transparency regulations promulgated by Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao under President George W. Bush that led to the prosecution and conviction of hundreds of corrupt labor officials.
Perhaps the most surprising response in the Conway survey, however, was the 62 percent of union household respondents who identified labor unions as “a significant contributing factor in the overseas exodus of American jobs.”
For more on the Conway survey, go here.
