Obama's Labor Agenda Rerailed
February 9th, the U.S. Senate failed to get the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture and proceed to a simply majority vote on President Obama’s nomination to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Craig Becker.
Becker was defeated 52-33 with the newly elected Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.) and Democrats Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) opposing. Becker’s views were very controversial as he suggested “workers should not be able to choose against having a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent.”
In a piece titled "Scott Brown and the derailment of Obama's labor agenda" for The Daily Caller, Johnson says:
With Democrats losing their Senate super-majority due to Scott Brown’s unlikely Massachusetts victory, expect Democrats to look for new ways to appease anxious interest groups like organized labor. Lacking the 60 votes needed to get anything out of the Senate, Capitol Hill is increasingly looking like a legislative graveyard for Big Labor’s priorities.
Big Labor’s most recent casualty is Craig Becker, President Obama’s nominee to the National Labor Relations Board. Early last week Democrats joined a unified Republican minority to oppose Becker, former associate general council to the Service Employees International Union. Becker, who once said, “Workers should not be able to choose against having a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent,” perfectly articulated the goal of the modern labor movement: to forcibly corral as many people into unions as possible.
With the seating of Sen. Brown, the unions feel they have lost their chances to pass labor’s most coveted piece of legislation, the Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act, aka “card-check.” EFCA would eliminate private ballots from union elections opening the door for harassment and intimidation of workers who oppose unionization.
As that window closed, another opened in the form of Craig Becker. Although over 75 percent of Americans disapprove of card-check, the NLRB can implement identical policy, making the vote for Becker so significant. Labor viewed his defeat as a defeat for de-facto card-check, as Becker could change labor law via an appointment to the board. Specifically, Becker would help the unions get more of the type of card-check certifications they already can achieve under law, by ignoring or dismissing the complaints filed by employers and individual workers. This gives the unions a much freer hand to exercise their extortionate and deceptive means of getting signatures and pressuring employers to accept the signatures in lieu of votes.
Click here for the full The Daily Caller article by Johnson.
Additional Resources
- Read AWF Executive Director Brian Johnson's article in BigGovernment.com on Craig Becker and why everyone should be afraid
- See what people on Twitter are saying about Craig Becker - click here
- PDF Document of this press release (also issued in Ark and Neb)
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