The Revenge of the NLRB Part II
It didn’t take long. After helping deliver President Obama a second term, Big Labor was handed victories on multiple fronts by the NLRB. Bill McMorris of the Washington Free Beacon has reported, “The board’s three Democratic appointees issued rulings that weakened checks on union power, including two high profile decisions forcing employers to automatically deduct union dues from worker paychecks when contract agreements expire and limiting the ability of employees to exercise their Beck Rights.” While in theory the NLRB is supposed to be impartial, in reality it is behaving like an extension of Organized Labor.
On the NLRB, Justin Wilson, Managing Director of the Center for Union Facts said:
“The board is an inherently political institution because it is made up of political appointees. They are constantly overruling themselves. Unlike the Supreme Court, they do not like to overrule existing precedent.”
An example of the aforementioned behavior has been the gradual erosion of the Beck Rule. Designed to protect employees from being forced to pay dues towards political activities, the NLRB recently ruled in the Kent Hospital case, “that lobbying could be considered an apolitical activity, a standard that would force non-union employees to pay larger dues.” Another setback included unions not having “to provide employees with accounting records that show employees what portion of dues applied to non-political activity under the decision.” With the NLRB showing no signs of slowing down their assault on worker’s rights, workers will have little hope that the next four years will be better than the last four years.
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