In a previous post, Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and National Right to Work Committee, noted that Democrats’ waning political fortunes might limit what Big Labor can do with it’s legislative strategy. The Examiner also spoke with James Sherk, Bradley Fellow in Labor Policy at the Heritage Foundation, who observes that, with a lack of legislative support from Democrats, unions might shift their focus to altering the regulatory landscape in a way that’s beneficial for them but dubious for the rest of America.
Like Mix, Sherk doesn’t see the unions curtailing their political aggressiveness. “Most likely I would expect to see them double down,” he said. “They’ll shift more effort to the regulatory issues, where with the Obama administration they can do things pretty freely.” On the regulatory front, Sherk notes that there are a number of key issues where labor is pushing for dramatic changes and their efforts have received comparatively little scrutiny.
–Unions are pushing to change a 75-year-old rule at the National Mediation Board that would make it easier to unionize airlines and railways. “That’s a dramatic change in a longstanding precedent, and they’re ramming that through without much attention,” Sherk observed.
–There’s been some speculation that unions might try and use the National Labor Relations Board to implement “shotgun elections.” “There’s nothing in the statute that says how long it’s going to be between when the union calls for an election and when the vote is,” Sherk said. If union leadership can call elections without allowing opposition any time to cooridinate a campaign against them, it would certainly be much harder to hold union leaders accountable and address corruption.
–Unions are pressuring Obama’s Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) nominee, Erroll Southers, to allow TSA screeners engage in collective bargaining. “Obviously, that would be good for the unions but wouldn’t do great things for passenger security,” Sherk said.
The TSA currently forbids unionization of TSA screeners.
And these just a few key examples of how unions are moving on aggressively the regulatory front. No doubt there are more union attempts to rewrite key regulatory safeguards to come
