Craig Becker is one radical dude. He claims management should be barred from National Labor Relations Board hearings on labor-management disputes, and he is a strong advocate of Card Check, the union bosses’ proposal to do away with secret ballots in workplace representation elections. None of this should come as a surprise, as Becker is the former associate general counsel for the radical Service Employees International Union and has represented the AFL-CIO in court. The son of a University of Iowa professor, he’s also a former law professor at Georgetown and the University of California, Los Angeles. In other words, he’s a product of two of the most out-of-touch milieus in American society. Only 7 percent of all private sector jobs are now represented by the unions Becker represents, and it is all but impossible to find a more uniformly left-wing group than the typical American college faculty.
So why is President Obama using his power of recess appointments — the right of a president to put somebody in an executive branch position until the next Congress convenes, which in the present case will be January 2011 — to install Becker as the deciding vote on the NLRB? The answer to that question, of course, starts with what the five-member NLRB does, which is oversee the administration of the National Labor Relations Act, the basic rule book for labor-management relations since it was signed by FDR in 1935. There is also the fact that last month Becker’s nomination fell eight votes short of the 60 needed to defeat a threatened Republican filibuster in the Senate, which left a recess appointment as the only way Obama could get his man on the NLRB.
Expect Becker to come on like a man possessed once he is ensconced at the NLRB because nobody expects the next Congress to be any more receptive to his appointment than the current one. But nine months of Becker on the NLRB is better than nothing, especially because the Senate has been markedly unsympathetic to Card Check, despite it being the union bosses’ No. 1 legislative priority.
Obama’s hope is that, with Becker calling the shots for the pro-labor NLRB majority, the board will find a way to circumvent Congress and throttle workers’ right to secret ballots. And, as the Examiner’s Mark Hemingway makes clear in a five-part series starting Monday on Page 23 titled “Obama and the Unions: How the President Takes Care of his Bosses,” doing the bidding of the union chieftains is central to Obama’s approach to governing.
Read the whole Hemingway series this week, and you will understand why it is no wonder SEIU President Andy Stern and the union’s chief lobbyist are the two most frequent visitors to the White House.
