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Individual liberty anywhere is a threat to the Progressive-Collectivist Cause everywhere.
A New York Times headline in January told the story: "Union membership in U.S. fell to 70-year low last year." The actual numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were even more dismal than suggested by the headline: Whereas at its peak in the mid-1950s, nearly 40 percent of all employed Americans were union members, by 2010, it had fallen to a mere 11.9 percent, counting both public- and private-sector employment. In the private sector alone, a mere 6.9 percent of all workers were unionized, the lowest in more than a century. Also notable here is that in 2009, for the first time ever, more than half of all union workers were employed by tax-funded local, state or federal governments rather than profit-driven private businesses.(from washingtonexaminer.com)
These trends became evident at the same time that union leaders had unlimited access to what were most likely their most sympathetic president and Congress ever, in great part because the labor chieftains spent nearly half a billion dollars on behalf of Democratic incumbents and candidates in the 2006 and 2008 elections. With President Obama and a Democratic Congress, unions appeared certain to get their No. 1 legislative priority -- card check, which would have abolished secret ballots in workplace organizing elections. With card check as law and Obama putting labor favorites in all the key positions at the Department of Labor and National Labor Relations Board, surely the decline in union membership would be reversed.Instead, card check is a dead letter, and about all that labor has left is a bunch of Obama appointees who are determined to grab as much power as possible via the federal bureaucracy. Nowhere is this more evident than at NLRB, where board member and former union lawyer Craig Becker has pushed the union regulatory agenda to radical new extremes. "Obama placed Becker on the NLRB with a recess appointment. Within three months, the National Right to Work Foundation had filed 13 motions noting Becker's conflicts of interest in decisions before the NLRB," The Weekly Standard's Mark Hemingway recently noted. "Oblivious, Becker has participated in handing down rulings in at least 17 cases involving unions he represented as a lawyer. In each of those cases save one, Becker ruled in favor of the unions," Hemingway said.
As a result, NLRB in recent months has exceeded its authority beyond anything recognizable in its enabling law, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Just last week, NLRB presumed to tell Boeing that it cannot build a new plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, but must instead do so in Washington state, which is not. The Becker board has also sought to implement card check via regulation by suing Arizona and South Dakota, where voters in November approved state constitutional amendments designed to protect secret ballots in the workplace.
Clearly the time has come for Congress to rethink federal labor law using a clean sheet of paper. The NLRA and the NLRB were designed for an industrial economy that no longer exists. As relics of 1930s-style top-down command-economy thinking, the NLRA and NLRB simply cannot adapt to a decentralized digital economy in which fewer than one in 10 private-sector workers carry union cards. And with Obama appointees like Becker in charge, they have become obstacles to freedom and progress in America's workplace.
As Attorneys General of our respective states, we call upon you, as Acting General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”), to withdraw immediately the complaint numbered 19-CA-32431 against Boeing.(full letter and story at redstate.com)
This complaint represents an assault upon the constitutional right of free speech, and the ability of our states to create jobs and recruit industry.
Your ill-conceived retaliatory action seeks to destroy our citizens’ right to work. It is South Carolina and Boeing today, but will be any of our states, with our right to work guarantees, tomorrow.
'Fundamentally transforming the U.S.A.' | You would think that they'd be saying 'Thank you'. |
Adolf Hitler marries his long-time partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor; both Hitler and Braun will commit suicide the next day (1945)
U.S. and South Vietnamese forces invade Cambodia to hunt Viet Cong (1970)
Riots in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King (1992)
b: Hirohito (1901), Bernard Madoff (1938); d: Matthias Kleinheisterkamp (1945)