Never mind Big Labor’s continuing all-out push to take away workers’ right to a secret ballot in the workplace with Card Check, which is officially and misleadingly known as the Employee Free Choice Act. Even if Card Check fails in Congress, the game will be rigged against small business owners and the managers of private corporations if President Obama wins Senate approval for Craig Becker as a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Presently associate general counsel of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Becker wants to use new bureaucratic regulations to interpose government between workers and the alleged atmosphere of compulsion created in the workplace by owners and managers. Writing in 1993 in the Minnesota Law Review, here’s how Becker, then a UCLA law professor, put it:
“This new legal framework would entail a body of new campaign rules. For example, employers could not lawfully exploit employee dependence to insure audiences for their anti-union speech. Thus, captive audience meetings at any time, not simply during the final twenty-four hours before an election, should be grounds for overturning an election. Similarly, the Board should not hunt through the workplace searching for the ‘locus of final authority,’ but instead should acknowledge that employer authority pervades the workplace and that compulsion is implicit when employers campaign during the work day.”
Becker’s new legal framework would bar owners and company managers from attending NLRB hearings about elections or to issue challenges even when there is evidence of union abuses. Becker would also prohibit owners or managers from having independent observers at the polls to challenge questionable ballots during union representation elections.
Such changes would translate into a dramatic departure from current law. Both sides of labor-management disputes have a voice at NLRB election hearings, and owners and managers can present their case to workers 24 hours prior to any workplace representation election. Union leaders claim the rule changes are needed because the field is tilted in favor of the companies. But data compiled by the Bureau of National Affairs show unions won more than two-thirds of NLRB-sanctioned workplace representation contests in 2008. That hardly sounds like the results one would expect in an atmosphere of compulsion.
More likely, Obama nominated Becker to advance the administration’s agenda of expanding the suffocating role of Big Government into every nook and cranny of the workplace. To whose benefit? Why, Obama’s friends in Big Labor, of course. They gave more than $74 million to federal candidates in 2008, 92 percent of which went to Obama and his fellow Democrats.
