thetruthaboutefca.com | The Truth About The Employee Free Choice Act & Card Check

The Daily Labor Report today has this interesting item:

At the request of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the National Labor Relations Board’s inspector general has launched an investigation on whether Member Craig Becker should have recused himself in a case involving St. Barnabas Hospital and Local 1957 of the Service Employees International Union.

… and …

In a June 15 letter to the inspector general, Issa formally requested that Berry investigate whether Becker’s participation in the unfair labor practice case against St. Barnabas “violated his ethics pledge or any other relevant conflict of interest provision.”

Muy interesante.

Check out LaborUnionReport’s post at RedState: SEIU’s Becker Wrongly Splits Hairs on His Refusal to Recuse Himself on SEIU cases

LaborUnionReport.com is helping lead the charge against card check-by-fiat and its personification, National Labor Relations Board member Craig Becker. The site points out that Becker is backtracking on an important promise he made to recuse himself from cases involving his former employer, the highly powerful Service Employee International Union.

Now Shopfloor’s Carter Wood is adding two very valuable cents, pointing out that Becker’s ethics pledge looked like swiss cheese, opining: “Well, if you’re going to blow through your ethics pledge, might as well be audacious about it. But Becker shouldn’t expect to be confirmed by the Senate via unanimous consent for a full term on the board.”

Keith Smith from the National Association of Manufacturers reports on Senate maneuverings to seat the highly controversial union attorney Craig Becker on the National Labor Relations Board.

It’s another reminder, as Smith notes, that Becker is the embodiment of the ill-designed, ill-intended, job-killing, anti-democracy Employee Free Choice Act and Big Labor is intent on making sure its seat at the table — and National Labor Relations Board — ends up in passing EFCA by that name or another.

It appears the impact of recess-appointed Craig Becker on the National Labor Relations Board may be having subtle but important and negative effects on employers and employees, or at least that’s one of several plausible conclusions to be drawn after reading some great investigatory work by Chamberpost.com’s Brad Peck.

He did some digging and found out that the NLRB is now essentially doing public relations work for unions, putting out notices of union-won elections (which, of course, greatly undercuts the argument for the sinisterly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act). What Peck found was that the PR work was a significant break from the past, when the Board remained neutral, as one would expect given the wording and spirit of the National Labor Relations Act. This left him to conclude:

Unions and some Board folks have in the past cherry picked a few words out of the 1935 policy declaration in the Wagner Act that it is the policy of the US to “encourage” collective bargaining – as if the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments were never enacted. This may be the line of thought justifying the new issuance of releases trumpeting employees choosing a union, while not issuing similar releases heralding the rejection of a union — but the NLRB should be proud whenever a fair election is conducted, whatever the results.

With fair elections resulting in employees choosing representation becoming the norm, one wonders whether those who want Craig Becker and the other members in the majority on the board to change the rules for elections understand that these results undermine their position.

We don’t need a skewed NLRB any more than we need card check. Both are bad for employees, employers, and the overall health of our economy.

Photo courtesy of:

Among the continuing reaction to news of the president’s ill-advised recess appointment of union attorney Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board comes from none other than a former Member of that board.

We tracked down John Raudabaugh, formerly of the NLRB and now of Nixon Peabody, with a question we’d received about the president’s departure from the standard practice of appointing members from both parties. Here’s what Mr. Raudabaugh offered:

“The NLRB is now 3 to 1. On August 27, it will be 3 to 0. Not since the New Deal and first six years of the NLRB, 1935-1941, has the Board been all Democrats or all from one party. Labor law reform followed in 1947 to balance the scales. Is the past to be prologue”

It’s hard to beat the expertise of someone’s who has sat in that very chair. And so many historical parallels one could get into …

UPDATE: More reaction coming in … The US Chamber adds 50 cases to keep an eye on and warns employers to be on red alert.

UPDATE(d) UPDATE: Thanks to BigGovernment.com readers for joining us! Also se more from Rob Bluey of Heritage, who writes: “The appearance of preferential treatment hasn’t stopped Obama from rewarding his allies at SEIU. Stern was picked in February to serve on Obama’s debt commission. Burger was tapped for Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board in 2009. And now Becker, despite Senate opposition, has secured a coveted appointment to represent the Big Labor’s interests at the NLRB.”

UPDATE to the third power: Keith Smith at Shopfloor.org asks the important question: Now what?