It’s been a busy week in Washington for both sides of the fight over workers’ and employers’ rights in remaining union free. In our March 11 issue of INK we mentioned Senator Jim DeMint had introduced a national Right-To-Work bill certain to fail in the Senate. On March 14, Rep. Phil Roe (R-TN) reintroduced the Secret Ballot Protection Act (H.R.972) in the House of Representatives, legislation that would amend the NLRA to guarantee the right to secret ballot union representation elections. On March 21 that bill was referred to the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions. H.R. 1047 was also sent to the Labor subcommittee after being introduced on March 11 by freshman Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC). H.R. 1047 would amend the NLRA to protect state requirements for secret ballot elections. The bill already has 27 cosponsors. This is the latest volley in the battle between the NLRB and Utah, South Carolina, Arizona and South Dakota, states where voters have protected their right to secret ballot elections in their state constitutions. Meanwhile, the Missouri House voted last week to become the fifth state to require secret ballot union elections. (Learn more about the NLRB vs. State Rights in the February 25 issue of INK.) Members of the same subcommittee are also still investigating the NLRB’s use of free Google ad space to engage in blatant union solicitation. Meanwhile, over at the Department of Labor, as we reported last week they’ve launched a new website to elicit suggestions on regulatory policy and processes in response to an Executive Order calling for government-wide regulatory review. Unfortunately, the DOL hasn’t been quite as compliant with another EO, the Open Government Directive, and its demand for transparency in government. While the DOL created a searchable enforcement database to publicly out all corporate evildoers, it also practiced a little union-friendly selective transparency in not granting access to union corruption data from the OLMS. As a matter of fact, the DOL searchable database includes no data from OLMS. And seeing as OLMS is solely responsible for enforcing Landrum-Griffin, we find this omission both curious and infuriating. Finally, over at the Becker NLRB, the union lovin’ decisions just keep on comin’! The NLRB has rejected a call from the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis to end over a year of harassment by UNITEHERE and give their employees the opportunity to have their voices heard in an NLRB election. It appears the only way an employer can stop union harassment (short of RICO – more on that later) is to give in to union demands for recognition regardless of how few employees support the union. The Becker Board has also granted union cultists and shop floor thugs the freedom to assault, threaten and harass their anti-union or undecided coworkers during elections and card drives, just as long as those committing the actual felonies aren’t officially appointed by the union to do so. In handing down its stunning decision on Mastec North America and Communications Workers of America, the Becker Board made clear that union members are actually “third parties” (so much for “the Union is You!”) unless they hold a title given by the union regardless of how much time they spend organizing for the union and smoozing around with union staff. Thus intimidation by these “third parties” is not cause to overturn an election even when the number of victims is larger than the margin of union victory. In his brilliant dissent to the decision, Member Hayes wrote “One of the principal reasons for finding many third party threats unobjectionable is that the protagonists are not in a position to make good on the threat. That rationale is applicable to many types of threats to affect an employee’s job or working conditions, but it hardly holds true for threats of a physical nature. Unless the Board is going to impose on an objecting party the burden to prove that an employee making a threat has greater pugilistic skills or physical prowess than the threatened employee, and it has not heretofore imposed such a burden, then it seems an acceptable general proposition that third parties making physical threats are capable of following through on them.”
