Obama engineers NLRB for trouble

One of President Obama's three illegal recess appointments to the NLRB, Richard Griffin, went from being general counsel of the International Union of Operating Engineers to a seat on that board.

In today's National Review Online, Phil Kerpen takes a closer look at Griffin.

Griffin has the dubious distinction of being the second board member ever (Craig Becker was the first) to join the NLRB directly from a labor union. In Griffin's case it's the International Union of Operating Engineers, where he was general counsel. The IUOE is one of the most chronically corrupt unions in America, with ongoing criminal investigations against several of its locals and a history of criminal misconduct.

The IUOE is an especially autocratic union that has been criticized by union activists for imposing strict censorship on members who have the temerity to criticize union leadership on the Internet. Griffin justified the gag rule as necessary to protect the “union’s sensitive and/or confidential internal workings.” In truth, the order was designed to make it impossible for workers to successfully challenge their corrupt leadership. Griffin even threatened to fine union members for challenging the gag rule in court.

In 1998 testimony to a House committee, Griffin argued for more expansive NLRB powers to order fines and other remedies, to enforce its decisions without a court order, and to allow unions to organize at single locations. Most significantly, in that testimony Griffin was asked whether unions and employers both engage in illegal conduct. He said: "The vast majority of illegal conduct is committed by employers, and therefore the vast majority of charges are addressed to employer conduct." The chronic criminal behavior in his own IUOE, of course, strongly suggests otherwise.

Griffin will accelerate the NLRB's illegitimate bureaucratic rewriting of our labor laws to tilt the playing field to union bosses. The losers will be not just the employers who are hamstrung by expensive new bureaucratic dictates, but also the workers forced into unions and into paying union dues against their will. Not to mention the workers who won’t find jobs at all in places where expensive NLRB dictates lead to plant closures or prevent plants from opening in the first place — or the consumers who suffer from all of this.

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