We’ve been talking for the better part of the year about how the Obama administration is using its powers to regulate labor and business relations to attack Boeing aircraft manufacturer for attempting to open a new manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Fortunately, there is one proposed law floating around in congress that would stop some of the abuse of power that Obama is indulging at the behest of big labor unions. It is called the Secret Ballot Protection Act. We need to urge congress to pass it.

To briefly recap, Obama has been trying to punish Boeing — and by extension sending a warning to all American businesses — for having the gall to want to build a new manufacturing plant in North Carolina. Even though Boeing would be brining thousands of jobs to North Carolina, Obama wants Boeing to be prevented from doing so and he wants to punish the southern states, as well.

This may sound incongruous, an American president trying to destroy jobs and business alike, but when the reason is discovered it reveals many things, this most especially: Obama has gotten his marching orders from unions and he is misusing his powers to regulate to fulfill the desires of Big Labor.

You see, Boeing is closing a plant in Washington State because unions there have launched so many strikes, have sabotaged manufacturing, and made the cost of business so expensive that Boeing wanted to give North Carolina, a right-to-work state, a shot at the business.

But then comes Big Labor’s bought and paid for president who decided that he could use his powers to regulate labor to prevent an American business from opening a new branch of its business in one of our own states.

Because Big Labor would lose a handful of jobs in Washington State (only to gain some in North Carolina), Obama decided that an American business wasn’t “allowed” to open a new plant at any location in this country that it wants to open a business. This assumed power is unprecedented and certainly quite un-American.

This isn’t the only illicit use of labor regulations that Obama is perpetrating. He is also using his National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to prevent business and employees alike from having enough time to fully explore the offerings of unions and business when employees are considering whether or not they wish to unionize their workplace.

The NLRB wants to severely shorten the time period between when a union confronts employees and they have to vote upon whether or not they will accept unionization. It currently takes up to 38 days for unions and employers to have the time to inform employees about what they are offering before the employees have to vote. Obama’s NLRB wants to slash that to 21 days.

Such a short period of time hurts business, union and employee alike as less time until a called vote prevents more informed employees.

One other thing that Big Labor wants Obama to install on our work force is something called Card Check (The Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA). This card check provision would take away from employees the centuries old right to a secret election when they are voting for unionization of their workplace.

Taking away the secret ballot means that employees have to vote in a form that allows everyone to see how they voted. This leaves employees open for harassment from union thugs and employers alike.

One way to prevent the loss of the secret election is to get congress to vote in the Secret Ballot Protection Act [H.R. 972 and S. 217].

There needs to be a slight change to this bill, though. LaborUnionReport talks about that change.

Introduced in the Senate back in January by Jim DeMint [R-SC] and the House in March by Rep. Phil Roe [R-TN], the Secret Ballot Protection Act would ensure that employees have a right to decide on the question of unionization through a secret ballot. More importantly, it would end, once and for all, the deceptive practice of card check which gives union organizers the ability to trick workers into signing their rights over to a union.

Given the current debate over the NLRB’s proposed rules to hold ambush elections, a simple sentence can be added to the bill that states: No election shall take place within 35 days following the filing of a petition, nor on a date to exceed 56 days following the filing of a petition.

By inserting a sentence into the Secret Ballot Protection Act that establishes specific timetables, this would negate management’s alleged stalling during certification elections, as well as negate union stalling during decertification elections.

Things like this can stymie Obama’s misuse of his power to regulate business and labor and prevent his payback to the unions that paid for him to win election.

In this horrid economy, in a day when job loss is endemic, these common sense limits of the jobs-killing effects of unions is something this country sorely needs.

The NLRB has ruled that unions trying to strong arm their way into businesses will now be afforded a sort of fast tracked voting process meant to give both businesses and employees far, far less time to learn about and understand the issues surrounding a vote in favor of unionization.

Currently when a union wants to get itself certified in a new company the NLRB takes between five and six weeks to conduct the elections. Under the NLRB’s new rules that time period will be shorted to a scant 10 to 21 days.

Now why is this a big deal? Former Chairman and NLRB member Peter Schaumber, appointed in 2001 by George W. Bush, says that this shortened time will harm businesses, especially small and mid-sized businesses that have little knowledge about unions and no attorneys with specialized union experience with which to protect themselves.

Schaumber recently told reporters to imagine if you were a small business and you had never heard of the NLRB and had no expertise in its arcane practices. He then laid out a scenario by which an employer could become a target of the union after the elections for all sorts of violations that he, the employer, didn’t even know existed.

This is precisely the sort of trap that the NLRB hopes to set for the business community.

In light of this, imagine how much damage that these fast tracked elections could do to business. It should be remembered that the teams that unions send out to implement certification elections are essentially salesmen and are not really interested in impartially representing employees. They most certainly are not there to help employers understand the process and what might happen after certification.

This new rule is also bad for employees. Employees are badly served by a fast track process that prevents them from hearing all parties concerned in a certification election. But Big Labor wants to make sure that employees only hear the union side of the story. There is something distinctly un-American in this refusal by unions to allow employees to hear all sides of the story so that they can make an informed decision about certifying a union.

As labor expert James Sherk says, “Workers’ deserve the right to hear from both sides and have time for reflection. The NLRB’s proposed rule directly attacks their right to make an informed choice. It is the latest example of the Administration putting unions’ institutional interests above the rights of workers.”

So what exactly is wrong with allowing employees the right to hear all sides and to become informed voters? What are the unions afraid of?

Perhaps the fact that union membership is lower than it has ever been tells that story?

Still, it is interesting to see the unions whine about Obama. This president has been the biggest booster to Big Labor than any other president in history. The business punishing regulations alone that Obama has saddled upon this struggling economy makes his efforts more destructive and favorable to unions than any two past presidents combined.

Obama is using his regulatory powers to force contractors to pay unions off to get federal work even if those businesses aren’t members of any union, he’s sallied forth from his castle to inform businesses about where they will be allowed to build businesses, his crony capitalist efforts have put big businesses all across the country under his thumb, and he’s eased as many regulations that keep unions in line as he can… and he plans to do even more.

Yet, despite all this bending over backwards for Big Labor, the unions are upset with The One. Why they are mad is instructive.

You see, the reason these anti-business, socialist-minded union thugs are mad at Obama is because he could not give them the one thing they really, really wanted. They wanted card check so bad they could taste it. They wanted that Employee Free Choice Act so that they could eliminate the secret ballot in union elections — so that they would be free to intimidate workers at will — and they wanted the government to have the power to mediate union contracts by eliminating the power of business owners and perspective union members alike from having any influence.

On that last point, unions don’t mind handing over all power to arbitrate earlier to the government because they assumed they’d control the government with their millions of dollars in campaign donations to compliant Democrats in Obama’s administration.

But Obama has failed to get card check passed like he promised. So, since they didn’t get their one thing, Big Labor is mad at Democrats. Now they claim they will withhold their donations from Democrats running for federal offices in 2012.

Big threat, sure. But don’t believe them. It’s all sound and fury signifying nothing. Big Labor will support Obama and the Democrat slate regardless of how miffed they are today.

It is fun, though, to see them poking each other in the eye even if it won’t ultimately mean much.

Apparently it’s so important that, according to a letter we have exclusively obtained, the IAM is frantically pestering the AFA-CWA to stop “intimidating” the workers who are voting in the election. Yes, you read that right — a union that is affiliated with the AFL-CIO wants another union to stop intimidating people. Keep reading, because it gets even better than that….

Read the rest at The Tattler.

Unionization via Regulation
-By Ivan Osorio

Are unions desperate? When it comes to reviving their fortunes in the private sector, it certainly seems that way. Union leaders, unable to reverse decades of continued decline in private sector membership, are seeking political solutions to their ills — specifically, changes to labor law that would favor unionization.

They pinned their hopes on the election of Barack Obama as President, following the Democrats’ winning control of Congress in 2006. With Democrats running both elected branches of the federal government, pro-union legislation — including “card check” and bailouts for underfunded union pensions — seemed imminent in the early days of the Obama administration.

However, effective Republican opposition managed to hold back much of the unions’ legislative agenda. Then the Democrats’ trouncing in the 2010 midterm elections ended union hopes of pro-union labor law changes in Congress. Yet despite that huge setback, unions haven’t given up on politics, and instead have moved on to a different arena.

Obama will need organized labor’s support for his reelection campaign, so it’s in his self-interest to stay on the unions’ good side. This may explain why his administration has been pushing unionization through regulation — enacting regulatory changes favoring unionization without the consent of Congress. Considering the lengths to which the administration is going, it’s fair to ask: Is Obama desperate to give unions something?

Two key agencies in the administration’s efforts are the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the National Mediation Board (NMB). The NLRB supervises the National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations involving most private sector employees, while the NMB does the same for the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which governs railroad and airline employees…

Read the rest at The American Spectator.

Senator Brown was being interviewed on WVIZ radio in Ohio when he was asked what he thought about the success of the EFCA in the Senate for the 112th Congressional session. “It’s not going to happen now,” the senator said.

If this is true then Big Labor should be extremely upset with President Obama and the Democrat leadership in congress. Will they take out their anger by withholding their enthusiastic support of Democrats in 2012?

One would think that this singular failure of the Democrats to get Big Labor’s most wished for legislation passed would be a deal breaker for labor. After all, labor has spent over $400 million in the last few years on getting Democrats elected and it seems that all that money went for no benefit to them. Labor’s loss of power has grown commensurately with its expenditure on Democrats, anyway.

Like old dogs that cant learn new tricks, though, it is likely that they will double down and try to pump more money than ever into the pockets of pliant Democrats. Like a beaten wife they keep coming back, it seems.