Right to Work Blog

The following U.S. Senators co-sponsored a cloture vote to end debate on Big Labor Lawyer:

Harry Reid, Roland W. Burris, Tom Harkin, Debbie Stabenow, Dianne Feinstein, Benjamin L. Cardin, Bill Nelson, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Amy Klobuchar, Mark Begich, Byron L. Dorgan, John D. Rockefeller IV, Edward E. Kaufman, Daniel K. Akaka, Sheldon Whitehouse, Sherrod Brown.

Please contact your Senators today and tell them to vote NO on cloture and NO on SEIU/AFL-CIO* union lawyer Craig Becker’s confirmation to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

*SEIU = Service Employees International Union AFL-CIO = American Federation of Labor – Congress of Industrial Organizations labor union

Racing against the clock, Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pushed through another Obama Big Labor nominee, Patricia Smith, before Senator-Elect Scott Brown becomes a Senator. Reid won this race, see the Senate votes here.

In addition, Reid is prepared to add radical SEIU & AFL-CIO lawyer, Craig Becker to the list of Obama nominees approved before Senator Brown arrives.

Please thank your Senators who voted against President Obama’s U.S. Labor Department Solicitor of Labor nominee Patricia Smith. And, urge your U.S. Senators to Vote NO on the impending Obama National Labor Relations Board nomination of Craig Becker. 

As the new U.S. Solicitor of Labor, President Obama’s nominee M. Patricia Smith will control the largest civilian pool of government lawyers after the Justice Department.

Then New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer appointed Smith Commissioner of the New York State Department of Labor (NYDOL). Having spent her entire working life as a government employee, Smith brings only bureaucratic experience to the table.

As NYDOL Commissioner, Smith used her position and federal funds to override a state hiring freeze to hire a politically connected union organizer as a state employee.

In her former NYDOL position, Smith fostered and named a program “Wage Watch” that created a direct and integral relationship between NYDOL government enforcement agents and the “program’s partners” who are Big Labor organizers and Big Labor front groups.

Then NYDOL Director of Strategic Enforcement and recently withdrawn Obama DOL Wage and Hour appointee, Lorelei Boylan referred to these Big Labor partners as NYDOL “community enforcers.”

In one giddy e-mail obtained by NRTW, Boylan wrote, “the ‘role of the commuity [sic] enforcer’ is where we will have to come up with original material.”

For a real world example of how this works let us take you back to the Clinton Administration’s Labor Department which colluded with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizers in an attempt to shakedown an employer to extract an agreement to hand his employees over to labor bosses. Watch the National Right To Work Committee’s interview with Randy Schaber (Link) and read the congressional investigative report (Link) that caused the firing of a Clinton appointee at the Labor Department in the 1990s.

It is past time to stop these political favors and manipulations of federal resources and laws to benefit Big Labor Bosses. And, that is exactly what we can expect with Smith’s confirmation as Solicitor of Labor. She did it in New York, and now she plans to do it across the USA.

ACT NOW, thank your senators who voted against Smith and encourage your senators to vote against Big Labor Lawyer Craig Becker’s nomination to the NLRB.

Newly-elected New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has signed an executive order ending the current system of pay to play politics in the Garden State. The order states that unions are now added to the list of groups which are barred from receiving state contracts of more than $17,500 if they had donated more than $300 to a campaign for Governor or county political committee in the previous 18 months.   The order is expected to curb the union influence and patronage that was prevalant during the Corzine administration.

As government unions grow more powerful than private sector unions, in part because of their ability to force workers into unions through a “card check” process, the drain on taxpayers continues to grow.

California is a shining example.

The Committee was forwarded an e-mail that, in part, read:

We have just learned from our contacts in Washington that the HELP committee [U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions] has postponed other scheduled business and will conduct a hearing on the [Craig] Becker [National Labor Relations Board] nomination next Tuesday at 4 p.m.

– Martin F. Payson

Detroit, MI (January 28, 2010) – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, a citizen activist announced today that he will file an appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court in an ongoing public disclosure battle over the use of school district e-mail systems for union political activities.

In 2007, political activist Chetly Zarko from DeWitt – invoking Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure law – requested e-mail communications among Howell Education Association (HEA) union brass regarding heated collective bargaining negotiations between the Howell Public School (HPS) system and union officials.  The HEA union is a local affiliate of the Michigan Education Association and National Education Association unions.

At the time of the collective bargaining conflict, Zarko suspected union boss lobbying was occurring at taxpayer expense.  Zarko is seeking the release of approximately 5,500 e-mails between the union hierarchy and teachers.

HEA union officials claimed a special exception from the requirements of Michigan’s FOIA law, despite the fact that the e-mails were sent over a taxpayer funded e-mail system and the HPS’s “Acceptable Use Policy” explicitly states that e-mails sent on the server are “not consider private communication [and] may be re-posted.” 

Foundation attorneys won a ruling from the Livingston Circuit Court requiring disclosure, but union lawyers managed to convince the State of Michigan Court of Appeals to overturn the lower court’s decision.  

“Public resources should not be spent on the shadowy and self-serving political activities of union bosses,” said Patrick Semmens, Legal Information Director of the National Right to Work Foundation.  “Howell Education Association union officials should be subject to the same public disclosure requirements as everyone else who uses taxpayer funds.”

            The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses.  The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, is assisting thousands of employees in over 200 cases nationwide. Its web address is www.nrtw.org. 

For Release: January 28, 2010

Contact: Anthony Riedel (800) 336-3600 

Radical Big Labor lawyer Craig Becker has been renominated to that National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by President Obama. 

The National Right to Work Committee has opposed Becker’s nomination from the start and other groups are joining the chorus.

The Committee’s Becker Alert highlights the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) Founder Wade Rathke’s ringing endorsement of Obama’s Becker nomination. Rathke wrote, “Here’s a big win no matter how you shake and bake it: Craig Becker being nominated for a seat on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)!

Becker, an associate general counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO, will likely support measures to eliminate a workers right to a secret ballot through executive action.  

Massachusetts Senate candidate Martha Coakley’s campaign was so dependent on big labor, “it was all we had,” one Democrat political consultant said.

The Purple Army of SEIU agitators are heading to Massachusetts to try to elect SEIU water-carrier Martha Coakley to the open Senate seat.

By Mark Mix (Washington Times Op-Ed)

Should American taxpayers worry about the federal government being unable to fire incompetent security agents at airports?

If the union bosses and their Democratic allies get their way by taking advantage of the latest terrorism scare, our national security soon could take a back seat to the same bureaucratic union rules that bankrupted General Motors. Since the Christmas Day terrorist attack was narrowly averted, there has been an intense public debate about exactly what went wrong and how such systemic failures can be prevented in the future.

However, the notion that putting airport baggage screeners in Detroit and other cities across America under union monopoly control could have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a plane in Amsterdam has no place in a rational debate. Contrary to the claims of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, forcing airport security screeners into union ranks could only serve to make it more difficult for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to do its job.

Seeking to exploit public concerns about this grave breach of national security, Mr. Reid targeted Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican, and other pro-right-to-work senators for refusing to rubber-stamp the appointment of Erroll Southers, President Obama’s Big Labor-endorsed pick to head TSA, without holding a debate first.

Only by giving Mr. Southers the green light with no more questions asked can the Senate give the American people “the peace of mind to know their government is doing everything possible to keep them safe,” Mr. Reid claimed.

Top union bosses and Big Labor puppet politicians like Mr. Reid can’t wait to have Mr. Southers installed as TSA chief because, although he refuses to acknowledge it publicly, they are confident Mr. Obama will have Mr. Southers overturn the agency’s current policy of prohibiting union monopoly bargaining over federal airport screeners.

Handing officials of a single union monopoly power to negotiate over how airport screeners do their jobs would make it harder for the executive branch to hire, fire, train and reassign workers to best meet ever-changing terrorist threats.

Union-boss-negotiated rules and regulations regularly protect the worst employees and make it impossible to discipline, reassign or terminate employees no matter how egregious the offense. Just ask the former GM supervisor whose horror stories include being unable to fire United Auto Workers members for having sex with prostitutes in a recreational vehicle parked in a GM loading yard because she couldn’t point to an applicable rule in the union contract.

The vast majority of Americans who understand what Mr. Reid and company want don’t like the TSA unionization scheme one bit.And that’s the real reason Mr. Reid is so angry with Mr. DeMint and other senators for resisting the Southers nomination and demanding a hearing.

Big Labor politicians in Congress could foist a union monopoly on the TSA by approving pending legislation explicitly designed to achieve that aim. Or Mr. Reid and the pro-forced-unionism majority of senators could simply allow pro-right-to-work senators to have their say on the Senate floor about the Southers nomination and then ram it through.

However, neither of these scenarios appeals much to Mr. Reid because they both require him to accept accountability for corralling TSA employees into a union, and he knows that’s not popular with his constituents in right-to-work Nevada or with Americans as a whole.

So, instead, he’s insisting that the Senate must rush through the Southers nomination, without any discussion, almost immediately after the chamber reconvenes this month – or the terrorists will have won.

The fact is, for all its real and perceived flaws, the TSA wasn’t responsible for Mr. Abdulmutallab boarding his plane in Amsterdam, and the atrocity he nearly perpetrated should not prompt the Senate to give a hasty rubber stamp to the Southers nomination.

Union monopoly bargaining at the TSA would increase the risk of the agency’s failing to prevent terrorists from boarding planes at U.S. airports. Pro-right-to-work senators are correct to insist on holding a debate on this important matter before voting on Mr. Obama’s nominee to head TSA.

Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.