Obama Labor Board Kills Important Secret Ballot Precedent

Worker advocate denounces NLRB’s ruling to take away protection workers have against card check forced unionism

Washington, DC (August 30, 2011) – Today, Barack Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) overturned its Dana Corp. decision, in which National Right to Work Foundation attorneys secured for employees the right to challenge union card check organizing campaigns with a secret ballot vote.

Under the Foundation-won Dana decision, workers may collect signatures to request a secret ballot election during a 45-day window period following notice that their employer has recognized a union based on a card check organizing drive. The ruling is intended to counteract coercive practices frequently associated with card check, which allow organizers to bully or mislead employees into signing cards that count as "votes" toward unionization.

The NLRB overturned Dana just as President Obama-appointed NLRB Chairwoman Wilma Liebman's term expired. Meanwhile, Obama-appointed Board Member Craig Becker, who co-authored a union brief in the original Dana case, refused to recuse himself from the case. Becker, a recess nominee, faces bi-partisan opposition to his confirmation in the U.S. Senate. One Board Member, Bryan Hayes, vigorously dissented and called the ruling a blatant roll back of employee freedom.

Any decertification votes that have been cast but not counted by the NLRB will now be discounted, thereby invalidating the voice of thousands of workers nationwide.

Read the entire release here.

Worker Advocate Asks Federal Labor Board to Uphold Precedent Disallowing Forced Unionization of Grad Students

Foundation files brief supporting university teaching assistants' First Amendment freedom of association

Washington, DC (July 29, 2011) – The National Right to Work Foundation filed an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) asking the Board to uphold its long-standing precedent to disallow union officials to corral university graduate students working as teaching assistants into unwanted union affiliation.

Foundation attorneys filed the brief with the NLRB in a case involving United Auto Workers (UAW) union organizers’ attempt to forcibly unionize graduate students at New York University (NYU) in New York City and ultimately to force them to pay union dues to maintain their status.

Seven years ago, Foundation attorneys filed an amicus brief in a similar case involving the UAW union attempting to forcibly unionize teaching assistants at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. In that case, the NLRB voted to return to its long-standing position of more than 50 years that teaching assistants have an academic, rather than economic, relationship with universities, and that teaching assistants are not “employees” as defined by federal labor law who can be subjected to union monopoly bargaining.

In their latest brief, Foundation attorneys argue that UAW union lawyers are using the NYU case as a means to overturn the Brown University case, even though the facts are different.

Meanwhile, Foundation attorneys undercut the union lawyers' arguments for new precedent that establishes teaching assistants as employees of the university, because grades are the central form of compensation for graduate students who are paid to teach, research, or perform temporary work.

Read the entire release here.

President Barack Obama's efforts to transition the Department of Labor into a giant, taxpayer-funded extension of Big Labor's organizing and political fund-raising machine just hit another milestone. President Barack Obama's January 30, 2009 executive order, aimed to help union bosses seize more forced dues revenue to fund Big Labor’s political agenda, was just printed in the Federal Register -- making it official. 

In a nutshell, the EO tears down posted notices to employees of federal contractors which explain they can actually refrain from paying forced union dues spent for union electioneering and the like.

Obama's directive intends to ensure millions of workers do not learn of their rights and revokes former-President Bush's February 2001 executive order which required federal contractors to post notices in the workplace simply informing employees of their right to refrain from formal, full-dues-paying union membership and pay only the documented cost of collective bargaining.

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys won these rights in their precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court victory in Communication Workers v. Beck (1988).  

Regular Freedom@Work readers may remember Obama's edict was one of the first in a long line of political paybacks to Big Labor for their use of over a billion forced-dues dollars in 2008 to elected him and his pro-compulsory unionism allies in Congress.  View some other Obama paybacks to Big Labor, including his picks on who controls the Department of Labor and the NLRB, rolling back union disclosure guidelines and reducing union boss accountability, and using taxpayer dollars to fund their forced dues operations and bail out union boss pension funds.

Employees File Federal Class Action Suit to Halt Abusive Mandatory Union Dues Scheme

Right to Work Foundation helps employees challenge national union’s illegal “annual objection” policy

Aberdeen, MD (September 21, 2009) – Today, two employees filed a class action federal suit challenging the International Association of Machinist and Aerospace Workers (IAM) union’s nationwide policy requiring employees to object year after year to paying union dues they cannot be lawfully forced to pay.

With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation, Jacobs Technology Incorporated employees Rick Gorham and Robert Negosta are challenging the IAM union officials’ scheme intended to thwart non-union members’ legal rights to refrain from paying union dues for union electioneering and other non-bargaining activities. Foundation attorneys filed the complaint in Maryland’s U.S. District Court on behalf of the two employees and all of Jacobs Technology’s other similarly-situated employees.

In the Foundation-won Communication Workers of America v. Beck (1988), the U.S. Supreme Court held that union officials can lawfully compel nonmembers to pay union dues as a job condition, but not the part of dues spent for non-bargaining activities like political activism, lobbying, and member-only events. However, these limited rights have been difficult to enforce, as union officials often concoct illegal schemes such as these “annual objection” policies to burden or thwart employees from exercising their rights.

(Continue reading this news release...)

Employees Force Settlement in Precedent-Setting Federal Union Racketeering Lawsuit

Right to Work Foundation uses innovative legal techniques after company and union officials collude to enrich union bosses

Phoenix, AZ (July 22, 2009) – With free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, five Phoenix-based employees who refrained from formal dues-paying union membership forced a settlement with the defendants in a federal lawsuit laying out how union agents conducted a corrupt scheme to divert sales commissions from the employees to union officials.

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys used the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) anti-corruption statute (establishing new legal precedent in the process) and the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) to attack a scheme allegedly orchestrated by Qwest Communications and Dex Media, publisher of the yellow pages phone books, and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1269 union bosses.

Evidence discovered in the lawsuit showed that IBEW Local 1269 union officials manipulated company procedures to receive greater compensation at the expense of the nonunion plaintiffs. Some of the methods used to increase the union agents’ compensation included reassigning accounts from nonunion employees to union officials, giving union agents “double commissions” for sales made by other workers, and allowing union officials to regularly sell lucrative “group ads” while denying similar opportunities to nonmember employees. By knowingly aiding union agents as they manipulated company rules to increase their performance-based pay, Qwest and Dex were accused of bribing union officials to act against workers’ interests in bargaining negotiations.

(Continue reading this news release...)