ACORN Founder Wade Rathke regarding SEIU Lawyer Craig Becker’s appointment to the five-member National Labor Relations Board once wrote:

“Thanks for a solid, President Obama!” And, “Craig Becker will no longer be a secret weapon for workers [read SEIU & AFL-CIO bosses] at the NLRB…” 

Rathke is right, Becker is no secret and, according to Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, he appears to be willing to violate ethical restrictions to help his “former employer SEIU.

From Hemingway’s 12/10/2010 story:

National Labor Relations Board member Craig Becker recused himself from a decision earlier this week that advanced organized labor’s top public policy goal, Card Check, but worries continue to grow in at least a dozen other cases before the board in which he participated despite apparent conflicts of interest for the former labor lawyer.

Becker recused himself from the case because he had written a brief supporting labor prior to joining the board.

Card Check is a bullying tool used by unions that … exposes workers to threats and actual physical intimidation by union organizers.

Becker refused to discuss the case with the Examiner or his rationale for recusals, as did a board spokesman.

Since joining the NLRB, the National Right to Work (NRTW) Foundation has filed 13 motions noting Becker’s conflict of interest in cases before the NLRB.Since joining the NLRB, the National Right to Work (NRTW) Foundation has filed 13 motions noting Becker’s conflict of interest in cases before the NLRB.

The cases from which Becker did not recuse himself involve significant issues and his former clients, including a case involving the SEIU, for which he did extensive legal work for in the past.

Becker claimed he would have no conflicts of interest in cases involving local chapters of unions whose national organizations he had represented because the former are “distinct legal entities” from the latter.

In fact, SEIU’s constitution says the national union has “jurisdiction over its affiliated bodies and all Local Unions.”

Becker also appears to be violating the Obama administration ethics pledge he signed in which he promised: “I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.”

Becker also refuses to hold himself to the same level of objectivity required of his fellow NLRB members, according to the foundation.

“[Becker] refuses to adopt the more stringent federal judge standard for recusal used by current NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman in cases concerning affiliates of the Teamster union, her former employer before being installed on the Board by President Bill Clinton,” the foundation said in a filing before the board.

Becker also has a long history of public criticism of NRTW, which often works on cases before the NLRB, further compromising his objectivity.

The NLRB will soon rule on another important case involving Card Check, the Lamons Gasket case, which is confusingly enough, also referred to as “the Dana decision.”

Lamons Gasket could reverse a  2007 NLRB decision also involving the Dana Corp., the AFL-CIO and UAW in which it said employees could invalidate a union that was organized through Card Check by holding a secret ballot election on the matter within 45 days of the new union’s certification.

The Right to Work group also argues that Becker denies having pre-judged attempts to overturn the 2007 Dana decision despite a long career of advocating an extreme version of forced unionism that considers secret ballot elections “profoundly undemocratic” and despite having authored an amicus brief in that case opposing granting employees the opportunity to petition for decertification of unions recognized by card check.

Becker’s brief argued the case “there is no essential difference between Card Check and secret ballots” and called the 2007 decision ‘bad labor-relations policy,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

For more information involving the legal teams invloved in the cases, visit the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation website.

The National Right to Work Foundation [NRTW] has aggressively pursued recusal motions against Craig Becker, a recess appointment by President Obama to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker had previously served as associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union, an organization which has come under increasing scrutiny in connection to illicit activities by Obama and his supporters.

Becker took an ethics pledge last April, at the time of his recess appointment, in which he swore to abstain for a period of two years from involving himself in any matter before the board in which a client or former employer had been involved. Despite this pledge, the NRWF [NRTW] has identified cases involving SEUI locals and in which Becker participated in the cases. Becker has insisted that local unions are “separate and distinct entities” from the SEIU itself. This contradicts the SEIU Constitution, which presumably Becker would know something about as counsel for that organization, and which describes local affiliates as “constituent subordinate bodies” of the national union.

The NLRB Inspector General, David Berry, sided with the Obama appointee, finding that an SEIU local and the SEIU national union were “separate and distinct.” As shaky as this reasoning may be, a case involving the Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center may display ever deeper ethical concerns with Becker participating in NLRB deliberations: The SEIU local at the Pomona medical center wishes to disassociate itself from SEIU. The NLRB has not yet responded to NRWF [NRTW] request for Becker to recuse himself from that case. It notes that his involvement in the Pomona case is even more troubling because Becker personally was involved in SEIU activities to get healthcare workers to join the SEIU.

Wade Rathke, who founded ACORN and was a former SEIU leader, lavished praise on the work that Becker did, stating: “His role was often behind the scenes devising strategy with the organizer and the lawyers, writing briefs for others to file, and putting all the pieces together, but he was the go-to-guy on all of this.” Rathke in further comments made it clear that Becker was much more active than simply a staff attorney representing a client: Becker was actively leading the drive to organize healthcare workers and to organize them as part of the SEIU.

… But it is unlikely that he will or that Attorney General Holder will move to compel Becker to do the right thing. The connect-the-dots unseemliness of Craig Becker on the National Labor Relations Board is too obvious and, sadly, in Washington, all too familiar.

Does Barack Obama want to wreck the American economy? That’s one obvious and troubling question raised by his recess appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board.

People who know anything about labor law are extremely worried about this decision. Appointing Becker to the NLRB is a bit like assigning the fox to guard the hen house — if chicken were an endangered species.

The president’s political calculus was simple enough. The union bosses wanted Becker, and Obama wants the unions’ support in the midterm elections. Becker is a lawyer who has represented both the AFL-CIO and the SEIU (and, by extension, ACORN). He is at the leading edge of radical labor opinion.

To wit, Becker helped to pioneer the idea of card check that unions so desperately want to pass. This change in labor law would effectively substitute the public clipboard for the private ballot box, which Becker has disparaged as being “profoundly undemocratic.”

Card check is deeply unpopular and is not likely to be passed by Congress, but Becker may have a way around that. He has hinted that the NLRB may be able to impose changes on the way unionization elections are conducted without Congress legislating any changes in labor law. He has also advocated that companies not be allowed to participate in NLRB hearings or contest election results, and that they not be allowed to have observers at the polls to challenge ballot fraud.

Becker wants this pro-union tilt to labor law because he believes that all Americans should be represented by unions, whether they like it or not. He has written, “Just as U.S. citizens cannot opt against having a congressman, workers should not be able to choose against having a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent.”

Congress saw that Becker on the NLRB would be a one-man card check bill.