President-elect Trump and Andrew Puzder, his choice for labor secretary, will be able to change a lot overnight.
All they have to do to is put a halt to President Obama’s constant push to empower his union allies and lay heavy new burdens on employers. Puzder, along with Trump’s appointees to head important labor panels, could instantly make hiring a lot less scary for employers everywhere.
For eight years, Obama’s Labor Department and his appointees at related agencies (such as the National Labor Relations Board) have focused on changes that give union bosses as much influence and relevance as possible at a time when unions are in decline. They have done it with little regard for how these changes affect the broader, non-union economy in which more than 85 percent of America lives and works.
And in its push to keep union bosses fat and happy, the Obama administration has also shown little regard for the law or the Constitution, which is why many of its changes have not survived court challenges. The last eight years of labor relations will be remembered mostly for government agitation to weaken and burden employers, which businesses have had to fight doggedly and at great cost.
The Labor Department itself created “the Persuader Rule,” which would have stripped (mostly small) businesses of client confidentiality with respect to the firms they hire to help them during union organizing drives.
The National Labor Relations Board created the “Notice Posting” rule, which would have forced employers to advertise unionization to their employees. It has also ruled that employees of franchisees can lodge complaints against the franchisor — McDonald’s, for example — with almost any flimsy argument that the larger company is somehow a “joint employer.”
The NLRB’s micro-union policy has actually been upheld in court. It allows unions that fail to persuade a company’s workforce to instead cherry-pick new bargaining units from among smaller segments of that workforce in which larger numbers might be more receptive.
The Obama-appointed National Mediation Board — which regulates labor in sensitive transportation industries — demolished a 70-year precedent near the beginning of his term in a naked effort to help a politically friendly union gain a foothold among the flight attendants of Delta Airlines. Instead of requiring unions to get backing from a majority of employees in order to organize them, the board reinterpreted the law to require only a majority of those actually voting. Delta’s flight attendants did not unionize, but the precedent remains broken.
Whatever they think of Obama, businesses all over America will be quite happy to see his constant jabs at them through labor policy come to an end. It goes without saying that they will also not miss Obama’s attempts to impose muddle-headed policies with less obviously political motivations, such as the Overtime Rule (whose implementation the courts have also blocked).
It falls to a Trump administration to restore the Labor Department to its proper place. Contrary to the impression one might have gotten from Obama’s policy, the Labor Department and its related independent agencies were not in fact created to make unions more powerful. Their purpose is to keep labor peace and to regulate unions. This includes making the organizations more transparent and more answerable to those who fund them.
We also hope that Trump will ask Congress to pass the Employee Rights Act, so that workers actually get to choose the union to which they belong and judge it on how well it serves them.
His labor appointees should quickly wind down Obama’s war on employers. It’s time the department and the important labor panels went back to settling legitimate worker complaints instead of trying to create rules and set precedents that make it easier for government to harass employers and grant union bosses new powers.
