Marathon Pundit: Becker backlash building

Friday, March 26, 2010

Becker backlash building

It's taken a few days, but some conservative media outlets are sounding the alarm that President Obama might appoint radical labor lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board:

From the Wall Street Journal--paid subcription required:

Big Labor is a big winner under the health-care bill, with millions of de facto government medical professionals teed up to be unionized over time. And now President Obama may give unions another victory by giving one of their top ideologists a key "recess" appointment to the National Labor Relations Board.

The Senate voted last month to block the nomination of Craig Becker, a leading lawyer for the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union. But Iowa Senator Tom Harkin said this week that Mr. Obama will bypass the Senate and appoint Mr. Becker to the NLRB during the Easter recess that begins as early as today.

Mr. Becker has written extensively about the National Labor Relations Act, the law that the NLRB interprets and enforces. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, he said that the "core defect in union election law . . . is the employer's status as a party to labor representation proceedings" and that "employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees' election of representatives." In other words, employers should be barred from telling their employees they shouldn't unionize.

During his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. Becker tried to walk back this and other oft-expressed views, including a prior assertion that union-election rules can be rewritten by the NLRB without the consent of Congress. Now he says he'll defer to Congress if appointed, but the modern union movement is bloody-minded about the will to power and Mr. Becker is one of its fiercest partisans.

From the Washington Times:

This gets to the heart of the fears about this nomination. The administration so far has been unable to push through Congress the radical plan to force union organizing through "card check" mechanisms in which workers would be denied a secret ballot when voting on whether to unionize. The purpose, clearly, is to invite coercion and intimidation to increase the ranks of dues-paying members. Mr. Becker let slip his suggested solution to the congressional difficulty back in 1993, when he said the NLRB could impose card check, or something close to it, with "no alteration of the statutory framework." Indeed, he openly called for "abandoning the union election."

Most experts think the NLRB's power would be limited to a rough approximation of card check rather than the whole, profoundly undemocratic scheme. Still, the effort shows the president is more than willing to make an end run around Congress if it pleases his union pals.

That's why, as Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis have indicated in recent weeks, the president is likely to give Mr. Becker a recess appointment that would let him serve nearly two years without Senate approval.

Worse, Mr. Becker's appointment would not mark the end of the payback. An executive order Mr. Obama signed last year will go into effect soon, requiring federal contractors to have project labor agreements that effectively shut out the 85 percent of construction workers who are nonunionized and requiring contractors to make contributions to union pension funds. In other words, Big Labor will cash in while taxpayers are stuck with bills some 20 percent higher.