Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach: Upcoming Obama visit to Boeing plant edition

President Obama will visit a Boeing plant in Washington state on Friday. The anti-jobs attack on Boeing in regards to the aerospace giant has been settled, but now is a good time to look at another case of NLRB overreach.

Writing for Townhall, Fred Wszolek of the Workforce Fairness Institute:

Toward the end of last year, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) finalized a rule for "quickie" or "ambush" elections. The final rule significantly diminishes the amount of time for workplace elections and threatens the unionization of workplaces without labor having secured the employees’ un-coerced majority support.

The Obama labor board majority, formed in April 2010, waited until June 2011 to propose a rule which would make startling changes in Board law and procedures. While the NLRB claimed the reason for the rule was delay in Board elections; that was in stark contrast to an earlier report of the acting general counsel who described the elections as taking place in a remarkably short period of time.

The unstated goal of the rule was to give organized labor the next best thing to card check: limiting, if not eviscerating, the time an employer has to express its views on unionization and its employees' right to hear those views and make an informed choice. The predominant, perhaps only, story the employees would hear is Big Labor's and there are few limits on a union’s ability to make promises that cannot reasonably be kept.

The proposal was so controversial that the NLRB received more than 65,000 comments, the vast majority of which were opposed the rule change. Since the Board is legally required to carefully consider each of the comments it receives and address the issues they raise, there was insufficient time for it to do so before labor radical Craig Becker’s term ended. As a result, the NLRB’s two member majority issued a final rule that was pared back from what had been originally proposed.

More NLRB overreach: Rubbing salt into the wounds of job-creators, the president formally nominated those three illegally-named recess appointments to the NLRB.

Thuggery reported by the National Right to Work Legal Foundation: AFSCME Union Bosses Hit With Federal Charges For Illegally Ordering Hospital Employee Fired

From the Workforce Fairness Institute: KEEP Secure Act Will Prevent Big Labor From Handling Your Personal Information

And finally, a press release from the WFI about President Obama's seriously-flawed proposed budget:

President's Budget Increases Funding To Job-Killing Regulatory Agency

Washington, D.C. (February 14, 2012)– The Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI) today released the following statement in response to President Obama's fiscal 2013 budget proposal:

"President Obama’s regulatory agencies have been working overtime to issue decisions that burden employers with unnecessary regulations and stack the deck in favor of unionization without regard for the rights and legitimate interests of employees and employers. In the last year alone, the National Labor Relations Board's acting general counsel issued a complaint against the Boeing Company for opening a facility in a right-to-work state, the board issued a decision permitting unions to petition to represent mini collective bargaining units that threaten to increase work stoppages and dramatically increase employers' labor relations costs, and promulgated a rule whereby employers will be denied a meaningful opportunity to express their views on unionization depriving employees the ability to make an informed choice," said Fred Wszolek, spokesperson for the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI). "Yet, in spite of all this and a national debt that has grown to more than $15 trillion, President Obama has seen fit to reward union bosses yet again by needlessly increasing his budget request for his labor board by millions of dollars. And this is in the face of an NLRB inspector general report that concluded the agency is spending too much money to begin with. Congress must send President Obama and his hyper-partisan labor board a message by pulling back on the unnecessary resources given to these unelected government bureaucrats who take actions that chill business investment, kill jobs and payback Big Labor bosses."