Labor lawyer Craig Becker’s nomination by President Obama to the National Labor Relations Board was stopped dead in its tracks last year by a decisive bipartisan vote against confirmation in the Senate. Chief among the reasons senators opposed Becker were his views on using government agencies to advance union organizing and expanding the political and legal power of the major national union organizations for which he previously served as counsel, the AFL-CIO and the SEIU. An outspoken supporter of “Card Check” — the union-backed proposal to abolish secret ballots in workplace representation elections — Becker had helped litigate a case that effectively would have done just that. So Obama gave Becker a recess appointment to the NLRB, which soon began adopting policies designed to circumvent the use of secret ballots, with or without congressional passage of Card Check. For the record, the 111th Congress was never able to approve a Card Check bill, and it is now considered a legislative dead letter with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives.
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