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We at the National Right to Work Committee are fighting at many levels to protect America's working men and women's right to decide for themselves whether or not a union deserves their financial support.
Whether it be in the state and federal legislatures, the courts, or hearing rooms at the FEC or the NLRB, we fight to ensure that workers join unions because they want to – not out of fear or federal mandate.
Please become an active member by pledging a monthly gift, or by helping us financially on one of the specific legislative efforts highlighted above.
Letter to President George W. Bush
FOR RELEASE: December 7, 2001
President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear President Bush:
On behalf of the 2.2 million members of the National Right to Work Committee®, I urge you to withdraw your recent nomination of Dennis Walsh to a term on the National Labor Relations Board.
In January, lame-duck President Bill Clinton installed Mr. Walsh, a tunnel-visioned proponent of forced unionism, at the NLRB as a recess appointment.
When you were running for office, you pledged your support for Americans' Right to Work without having to pay union dues. Mr. Walsh's record of blind support for Organized Labor is wholly inconsistent with your stated position.
In his short tenure on the NLRB, Mr. Walsh has teamed up with other Big Labor-friendly Clinton appointees to issue a series of radical and often precedent-smashing decisions that intensify union bosses' federally granted forced-unionism powers over employees -- the very powers you pledged to fight.
As you know, current federal labor statutes authorize Big Labor to force employees who choose not to join a union to accept a union official as their "exclusive" (monopoly) bargaining agent and pay union "fees" as a job condition, or be fired.
But federal court decisions over the past four decades have at least put modest limits on union officials' coercive powers.
Under federal law, a worker may be forced to pay union "fees" as a job condition, but cannot be forced to become a union member subject to tyrannical union "discipline," or bankroll union officials' non-bargaining activities with his or her dues.
Since the mid-nineties, even the rudimentary rights that workers who choose not to join a union retain under the law have repeatedly been assaulted by Clinton NLRB appointees.
Over the past year, Mr. Walsh has been leading the charge.
For example, on August 29 Mr. Walsh joined with fellow Clinton appointees Wilma Leibman and John Truesdale in the highly controversial BellSouth decision.
Mr. Walsh, Ms. Leibman, and Mr. Truesdale found that workers who choose not to be union members can be forced by union officials to wear union logo patches on their uniforms in order to keep their jobs.
How meaningful is the right not to join a union if you can be forced to serve as the union bosses' walking billboard?
A month after BellSouth, Mr. Walsh and three NLRB cohorts effectively overturned decades of court decisions making it illegal for union bosses to discriminate against union nonmembers who apply for a job through a compulsory union hiring hall.
While surreptitious discrimination against union nonmembers is nothing new, the NLRB's Steamfitters Local 342 ruling creates, for the first time, a legal sanction for hiring-hall discrimination against independent workers, unless they can prove it is "deliberate" -- which is practically impossible.
The Walsh-Leibman-Truesdale troika has also given sanction to intimidation tactics used by union officials seeking to prevent union members from exercising their legal right to resign and cease bankrolling Big Labor lobbying and politics.
In February's Autoworkers Local 1853 ruling, Mr. Walsh joined with his cohorts to authorize union bosses to threaten workers who resign from a union with the prospect of multi-thousand dollar fines should they decide to rejoin years later.
Common sense dictates that workers who oppose the practices of their union monopoly-bargaining agent should have the legal right both to resign and later to rejoin in order to try to change those practices "from within" -- without being subjected to special penalties.
But Dennis Walsh, apparently blinkered by collectivist ideology, disagrees.
Attorneys for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Committee's sister organization, are now appealing in federal court to reverse the harm done by Clinton NLRB appointees in the aforementioned cases and others.
However, courts have traditionally granted the NLRB an enormous amount of leeway to interpret labor law as it pleases.
Therefore, the best remedy is for you to send to the NLRB members who support the individual employee's Right to Work and vow to protect it to the maximum extent possible under current law.
The Clinton NLRB holdovers' anti-Right to Work crusade is stripping thousands of America's most talented and creative employees of their freedom to think independently.
The consequences for our country are lower workplace morale, lower productivity, and avoidable damage to an already weak economy at a time of national crisis.
That's why the nomination of Dennis Walsh for a full NLRB term is unacceptable, regardless of any other nominees with whom he is packaged.
Mr. President, the American people deserve an NLRB that is a fair arbiter of workers' complaints and grievances, whether they are directed at business managers or union bosses.
Instead, they have been given an NLRB that repeatedly twists the law to broaden union bosses' "right" to compel dues.
This must change. I urge you to show your opposition to forced unionism by only appointing NLRB nominees who respect Americans' Right to Work without being forced to pay union dues.
The first step in achieving this worthy objective should be to withdraw the nomination of Dennis Walsh.
Sincerely,
Reed Larson
President