Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach, Hoffa edition

Wednesday, September 07, 2011

NLRB overreach, Hoffa edition

DC bus card, 2009. Hoffa: "Since when is a secret ballot
election a basic tenet of democracy?"

As regular readers of this blog know, James Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters Union, referred to tea partiers and Republicans as "sons of bitches" in a warm up speech for President Obama on Labor Day in Detroit.

This is not the first, and it is no doubt the last offensive statement Hoffa has emitted. When Big Labor was trying to force union card check through Congress, Hoffa erupted with, "Since when is a secret ballot election a basic tenet of democracy?"

More from Michelle Malkin in National Review Online:

Barack Obama and Jimmy Hoffa are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Lady Gaga and hype, the Jersey Shore cast and hairspray: inseparable. The president can no more disown the Teamsters Union's leader than he can disown his own id.

At a Labor Day rally in Detroit on Monday before Obama spoke, Hoffa stoked anti-tea-party hostility by urging his minions to "take these son of a bitches out." (Botched grammar added that extra boost of street-gang authenticity to the labor lawyer's threat.) The same civility police on the left who decry any references to crosshairs as incitements to violence are now mute about Hoffa's brass-knuckle rhetoric. The Chicagoans in the White House refuse to comment.

Those calling on Obama to condemn Hoffa's uncivil tone are deluding themselves. The 1.4 million–member Teamsters lifted Obama to power with a coveted endorsement and bottomless campaign coffers funded with coerced member dues. Over the past two decades, the union has donated nearly $25 million to Democrats (compared with $1.8 million for Republicans).

The Daily Caller:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka refused to denounce the vitriolic rhetoric that his fellow union leader, Teamsters President James Hoffa, espoused in a speech on Monday.

While warming up a Labor Day crowd in Detroit before a speech by President Obama, Hoffa said unions should fight a "war" with tea partiers and congressional Republicans. "President Obama, this is your army," Hoffa declared. "We are ready to march. Let's take these sons of bitches out and take America back to where America we belong."

On CNN’s "Piers Morgan Tonight," Trumka said he "probably wouldn't have chose the adjectives [Hoffa] used" but that he supports the premise.

Jason Vines of the Detroit News:

Am I mad that Jimmy Hoffa called my dear mother the B-word?

I am, after all, her son and I am a conservative Republican and love the tea party. Therefore, ipso facto, if Jimmy wants his buddies to "take these son of a bitches out" then I guess I am a target and Momma Wisecracker is a "you know what" in his eyes.

Ah, that new civility called for by our president. The same president who pulls the lowest form of partisan politics and demands a full session of Congress for him to speak at the exact same time Republicans have scheduled their first major presidential debate. He said he wanted to go back to the unifying spirit of 9/11, but I guess 9/7 doesn't count.

On Facebook and some conservative blogs, a boycott movement targeting businesses that have Teamsters on their workforce is developing.

In non-Hoffa but NLRB news, Fred Wszolek hammers the overreach in Townhall:

Just a few short weeks ago, the Washington metropolitan area was preparing for Hurricane Irene and the strong winds and rainfall accompanying the storm. Most parents and homeowners were running around town picking up batteries, buying flashlights and purchasing water in the event there were significant disruptions in power. Yet, in a little known agency stocked with unelected bureaucrats carrying out an agenda dictated by Big Labor bosses and faithfully executed by President Obama's Administration, members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) worked feverishly over the weekend to complete new regulations on workers and small businesses that will increase unemployment and economic distress.

The agency, supposedly "independent" and founded to help administer to relations between employers and unions in the private sector has become an advocacy arm of union bosses. Unable to enact their radical, job-killing agenda in Congress, Big Labor has co-opted a regulatory agency within the executive branch to do its bidding. The results speak for themselves as this past week, the NLRB issued a number of decisions which will make it harder for existing businesses to keep the lights on, and certainly make future employers think twice before they invest time and energy into an enterprise the government is more interested in exploiting than growing.

Among the NLRB's decisions, Specialty Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center of Mobile radically alters how collective bargaining units are defined in every industry despite the dishonest claim made by Obama's labor board in its press release that they "did not create new criteria for determining appropriate bargaining units outside of health care facilities." The new standard mandates that the only requirement to form a unit is a "community of interest" meaning the tight ends on a football team could constitute a unit, while the offensive linemen or wide receivers would constitute separate units. The NLRB makes it nearly impossible for employers to expand the pool of individuals in the so-called "community of interest" as the employees outside the unit would need to meet an arbitrary threshold classified as an "overwhelming community of interest." The practical effect of this is that under one employer's roof, multiple mini-units could be formed resulting in dramatically increased labor relations costs due to the proprietor having to bargain with multiple units negotiating against one another. As one reads this, an obvious question comes to mind, how does this create one job? It does not and demonstrates the Obama administration is in the business of promoting unions over worker concerns, instead of working to reduce unemployment and turn the economy around.

The last clip seems to be a non sequitur, but it is not. While the president was on his tax-payer funded Midwestern campaign bus tour, Obama was claiming that Congress was preventing several free trade agreements from being signed into law. He is at best obscuring the truth. Big Labor is against the FTAs, and remember what I said about Obama the other day--every day is Labor Day for him.

Writing for Politico, friend of the blog and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tells it like it is:

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

Right now, there are three pending export agreements negotiated by the White House that could create and support thousands of jobs. But after two years of delay, the Obama administration still has not sent them to Congress for consideration.

These free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea would have a significant positive effect on our economy. They would support 250,000 jobs spanning all sectors of our economy, including manufacturing, services and agriculture, according to the administration's own calculations.

Every $1 billion in new exports of U.S. goods supports up to 6,000 additional jobs here at home. Trade directly translates to support for local economies and jobs. In my district, California's Central Valley, 139,627 jobs are directly supported by exports. In 2010 alone, $44.3 billion in merchandise was exported from businesses there. Similar statistics abound across the country, and the potential for U.S. job growth only increases with these new agreements.

Yet, Americans listening to President Barack Obama this summer may mistakenly believe that Congress has delayed passage of these export agreements. There is nothing further from the truth.