Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach: Downstate Illinois is dangerous edition

Confluence of the Ohio and the
Mississippi, Cairo, IL

The overreach is being enhanced by sneakiness at the radicalized National Labor Relations Board. But first a Prairie State diversion.

If you live in southern Illinois, I suggest you move. Downstate is dangerous.

AP explains:

Workers filing on-the-job injury claims at just a dozen state institutions clustered in southern Illinois collected nearly one-third of the total $127 million awarded in recent years for permanent impairment under Illinois' troubled workers' compensation system, The Associated Press has found.

Leading the pack was Menard Correctional Center in Chester, according to an AP analysis of state records. Employees at the prison, now a focus of three fraud investigations into the injury-claim process, collected $19 million in long-term benefits from 2007 through 2010. That's nearly twice the amount previously reported.

But beyond Menard, the AP study found a pattern of large payouts at 11 other state facilities within 80 miles — including prisons and juvenile detention centers, mental health and developmental centers. In all, the dozen state facilities accounted for $40.7 million of the compensation for injured workers' long-term impairment during those four years.

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The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union representing most of the employees, defended legitimate compensation for injuries at work in prisons and mental health hospitals. "That work is difficult, it is physically intensive, and it can be dangerous, and people get hurt," spokesman Anders Lindall said.

From the an op-ed by the the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace's Geoffrey Burr in the Washington Times:

Having lured in viewers with the promise of an open meeting but then cloistered themselves away in another government conference room and broadcast their discussion by closed-circuit television last week, two members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) pushed through troubling new union-organizing rules that are favorable to big labor but harmful to both employees and employers.

The decades-old agency, which is charged with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing the right of workers to join or not join a union, is down to just two Democratic appointees and one Republican. Heading into last Wednesday’s meeting, the Democratic duopoly were tight-lipped about their plans for a new rule, but the anti-employer, anti-employee outcome spoke volumes about whose agenda is being enacted at the board.

The board proclaimed that it would not include a provision in its final rule to require that pre-election hearings take place within seven days. Previously, when a union was attempting to organize a workplace, the employees had an average of about 38 days before an election. Instead, the board reduced the period to 10 days. Such a short time would mean employees would have virtually no chance of getting enough information before casting their vote, and small businesses would be severely limited in educating their employees without running afoul of the agency’s often arcane and complex rules.

It took public outcry, including many of the 65,000-plus public comments the board received, to cause the agency to dispense with its plan for a seven-day limit and not require employers to disclose employees' phone and email addresses, as it had planned originally. However, the board said it would impose new rules that would substantially limit the issues an employer could raise in the pre-election hearing and curb an employer’s right of appeal. As a result, in many cases, neither employers nor employees will know which employees will be in any final bargaining unit prior to the vote, and the election period likely will be chopped down.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Lone Republican member Brian Hayes' failure to make good on his resignation threat let the National Labor Relations Board advance a new union-friendly rule for workplace "snap elections," costing America's economy a golden opportunity to neutralize Big Labor's puppet agency.

If he'd had sufficient courage of his convictions to resign, Mr. Hayes would have denied the NLRB's two-Democrat majority a quorum for Wednesday's vote.

Labor Union Report: Help halt the NLRB's assault on America's union-free workplace

TrogloPundit: Gov. Walker: "Unions spent $40 million on six state Senate recall elections in my state. I spent $13 million running for governor."

And finally, I return to the Washington Times:

The Democratic National Committee's pledge to use union contractors at its 2012 convention in Charlotte, N.C., is getting pushback from Republican state lawmakers who say the practice is undercutting local companies.

The North Carolina House last week passed a nonbinding resolution asking the DNC to change its rules and to give hiring priority to state companies, regardless of whether they are a union shop.

The measure calls on the DNC to "refrain form hiring workers and companies from outside (North Carolina) when qualified business or workers are available within the state." The resolution was spurred on by a complaint from a North Carolina printing company that complained the DNC passed it over in favor of an out-of-state business.

"I think it's only fitting that Tar Heel workers at least have the opportunity to benefit," said state Rep. David Lewis, a Republican and the resolution’s sponsor.