Nat'l Mediation Board overreach needs to be checked too

BNSF train, Colorado plains

There is so much overreach within the Obama administration. Besides the National Labor Relations Board power grab, there is similar concerns with the National Mediation Board, as the Daily Caller articulates:

While the [NLRB] issues merit significant attention and scrutiny, we should not lose sight of a critically important matter concerning worker rights and the battle against forced unionization, especially now with the FAA Reauthorization and Reform Act of 2011.

This legislation has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and will now be melded with similar legislation that the Senate passed. A key difference between the two bills is that the House version undoes a rule put in place by yet another regulatory agency, the National Mediation Board (NMB), which upended nearly a century of precedent with regard to workplace elections in the airline and railroad industries.

Before the NMB's rule change, a simple majority of employees was required to change a workforce's status and create a collective bargaining unit. But two board members at the regulatory agency with well-established track records of having worked with Big Labor monopolies decided to alter a policy in place since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president in order to tilt the playing field in favor of union bosses.

As a result, the NMB fabricated a new rule that required only a majority of those voting, as opposed to the majority of the entire workforce, to create a collective bargaining unit.

Apologists for Big Labor like to point out that the new rule matches those of our elections--when a candidate gets the most votes, that politician is the winner. A majority of voters is not needed. However, that pol has to face voters every two to six years, and in some constituencies public officials may face the threat of a recall election. Meanwhile, no railway or airline union has ever been decertified. Voting "Union, yes," means voting union forever. The bar needs to be high for these elections.

Technorati tags: politics Democrats organized labor unions