Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach, contempt edition

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

NLRB overreach, contempt edition

Where are the jobs? President Obama and his radicalized agencies are killing them.

From the Puget Sound Business Journal:

As the war of words escalates in the National Labor Relations Board case against The Boeing Co., it's possible that the NLRB's acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, could face a charge of contempt of Congress — and even jail time — for refusing to comply with a House committee subpoena.

Solomon has received a subpoena from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to release communications between the NLRB and the union. On Aug. 12, he sent a five-page letter to Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, with a total of 80 pages of attachments and court citations, stating the reasons for his refusal to comply with the subpoena.

In his letter, Solomon said that releasing the documents prematurely would impair the rights of the parties to the case to a fair trial and raises "separation-of-powers concerns."

Labor Union Report tells us about labor goonery:

This is a developing story as police are still investigating the shooting of a non-union business owner, John King, by what appears to be a union assailant.

With around 25 employees, John King owns one of the largest non-union electrical contracting businesses in the Toledo, Ohio area. As a non-union contractor, his business happens to be doing well at a time when unions in the construction industry are suffering. This, it seems, has made the usual animosity unions have for him even greater, making him a prime target of union thugs. So much so, that one of them tried to kill him last week at his home.

More...

Unfortunately, being a non-union electrical company, King has always been on the radar of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). In fact, in 2006, he won a significant case against the IBEW at theUS Court of Appeals, after the union had improperly promised his electricians jobs on union sites if they voted the union into King's company.

Since he's been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King's company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions.

Sometimes, actually a lot of the time, workers choose to vote, "Union, no." From AP:

Pilots at JetBlue are choosing once again to go without union representation.

It is the second time in three years that pilots at the New York airline have tried and failed to unionize. The latest attempt was driven by the Air Line Pilots Association, or ALPA, which represents more than 53,000 pilots at 39 U.S. and Canadian airlines.

JetBlue Airways Corp., one of the only U.S. airlines that is entirely nonunion, said Tuesday that 58 percent of just over 2,000 valid votes were cast against bringing in some form of representation. Forty-two percent of votes were cast in favor of a union.

The first grass-roots attempt to unionize took place in 2008. Pilots at that time wanted to form their own union and avoid teaming up with a larger national labor union such as ALPA, which has difficult relations with management at some other airlines. At that time only a third of the pilots voted in favor of the union.

Check out this Bloomberg headline: Obama on Iowa stump says strong recovery will begin with small businesses.

But National Review Online says: Business under assault. And the Tampa Tribune adds, NLRB pleases unions by strangling economy.

And finally, the Daily Caller reports on the NLRB's plan to hasten its War on Prosperity.

The National Labor Relations Board's "quickie election" proposal has received a nearly unprecedented backlash from Americans nationwide.

If the NLRB finalizes its proposed rule, the time between when union organizers file a petition and when an election takes place would be shortened to just 7–10 days. Traditionally, unionizing elections are held up to six weeks after organizers meet the petition requirements for one.

But since the Board published its proposed rule change in the Federal Register on June 22, more than 17,000 public comments have come in. Most of them are critical of the proposal. Members of the public can comment through August 22.

Though some public comments are undoubtedly from advocacy groups and organizations with a financial stake in the battle's outcome, thousands seem to have come from ordinary Americans.