Wow – it seems that as soon as the EFCA was put to rest, every government friend of Big Labor, from the halls of Congress to the backrooms of bureaucratic agencies, has opened their toolbox to find every possible way to continue to work on behalf of their benefactors. Fortunately, friends of American Enterprise seem to have stepped up their engagement in the tug-of-war. Our story below (Public Union Debacle…explains the effort of many state and municipal leaders to reign in costs by reforming public pensions (many of them union) and nullifying collective bargaining agreements. At the federal level, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced a House Resolution aimed at preventing the federal government from bailing out failed public employee pension funds. Many states are ratcheting up the assault on both public and private unions, including the banning of the right of public employees to form unions, banning the right to strike for public school teachers, and implementing Right-To-Work laws (Missouri and Minnesota so far). The newly named Education & The Workforce Committee released a statement that said in part, “Republicans will oppose policies that strip workers of their right to a secret ballot in a union election, whether those policies are advanced in the halls of Congress or through decisions made behind closed doors by unelected bureaucrats.” It remains to be seen how much energy will be expended in this effort, and this panel discussion by former DOL agency members emphasizes the difficulty of galvanizing congressional action (approximately a 1-hour video, and very interesting). Big Labor’s powerful friends have not been deterred by the recent election results. As we reported a few days ago, while several states passed laws protecting the right to a secret ballot for union representation elections, the NLRB has declared such laws unconstitutional and threatened to sue. Further board actions detrimental to business include: • The potential implementation of a “religious purity test” for organizations that are exempt from the NLRB due to religious purposes, as was as was upheld as recently as the 2009 case Carroll College Inc. v. NLRB. • Changing the rules on appropriate bargaining units within acute care nursing homes. NLRB member Brian Hayes fears changing this rule would change the broad test used to determine the appropriate units in all industries, which has stood for 50 years. • The inclusion of new default language in settlement agreements which heavily penalizes employers for failure to comply, and provides that signing the agreement constitutes a wavier of any right to file an answer. Another DOL agency, the Office of Labor-Management Standards, has also chimed in with a move of their own, designed to allow electronic voting for union officials, removing union members even further from legitimate democratic voting rights. Statistics from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) indicate that charges were up more than 7% in 2010 versus the previous year. Interestingly, for the first time since the EEOC became operational in 1965, race was not the most prevalent category of alleged discrimination. Rather, retaliation under all statutes (36,258) surpassed race (35,890) as the most frequent basis for filed charges. As we have continued to warn, it appears that unions may be encouraging employees to use such filings to bring pressure on employers for organizing or collective bargaining purposes. Similarly, this labor official suggests that OSHA is grievously outdated, and is calling for a “makeover” at the agency for the purposes of increasing its enforcement capacity. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder how the unions would use this to their advantage.
