Right to Work Foundation Attorneys Move to Disqualify Controversial Recess Appointees from Six Cases

Argue Labor Board does not have legitimate quorum to hear pending cases

Washington, DC (January 30, 2012) – Today, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys filed motions with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to disqualify President Barack Obama's recent purported recess appointees to the agency from participating in the Foundation's six cases pending before the Board.

Foundation attorneys argue that the appointments are unconstitutional and, therefore, the Board lacks the quorum necessary to hear Foundation cases. This legal challenge is part of an ongoing controversy over the constitutionality of Obama's recent move to install three members to the NLRB as "recess appointees" despite the fact that the U.S. Senate was not in recess.

Foundation attorneys also were among the first to challenge the constitutionality of Obama's "recess appointments" in federal court. An earlier motion challenging the appointments, filed by the Foundation and other plaintiffs challenging the NLRB’s notice posting rules, is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Read the entire release here.

Read one of the Foundation attorneys' motions to disqualify the "recess appointees" here.

Worker Advocate Challenges Constitutionality of Obama's Controversial Labor Board Recess Appointments

Case over controversial NLRB posting becomes first legal challenge to Presidential attempt to make "recess appointments" without actual recess of the Senate

Washington, DC (January 13, 2012) – Today, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys filed a motion in federal court challenging the legality of President Barack Obama's recent purported recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The legal challenge is part of a larger case attacking controversial new NLRB rules that require every employer to post incomplete information about employee rights online and in the workplace, even if they've never violated or been accused of breaking federal law. The NLRB's posting rules do not require union officials to issue information about workers' rights to refrain from union membership or opt out of union dues. Currently employers can only be required to post notices if the Board has ruled that a violation of labor law occurred.

The Foundation's case has been consolidated with other legal challenges to the biased NLRB notice posting rules brought by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), and two small businesses. Those parties filed the joint motion today raising the issue of the NLRB's lack of authority to implement the rule given the unprecedented recess appointments.

The new filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia case comes after NLRB lawyers notified the court that President Obama's recent recess appointees were now parties in the ongoing legal battle. Under the U.S. Supreme Court's New Process Steel decision, the NLRB needs three members to act. However three of the five current NLRB members were installed by unilateral Presidential appointment earlier this year, despite the fact that the Senate was not in a self-declared recess.

In the motion papers, Foundation attorneys argue that the controversial appointees to the Board are not legitimate because the U.S. Senate is still in session per the body's rules, so there was no "recess" for the President to make appointments without Senate confirmation. Therefore the NLRB lacks the necessary quorum to implement the new posting rules. Foundation attorneys are asking the judge to rule on the constitutionality of the three recess appointees.

Read the entire release here.

Last week, President Obama's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposed new guidelines which will help give union organizers the upper hand over independent-minded employees, and make union organizing campaigns as one-sided as possible.

The new rules, which are designed to allow union organizers to browbeat workers into union ranks and keep independent workers from opposing unionization, make it easier for union organizers to launch stealth campaigns in which they have access to the personal information of workers and harass them (including by making "home visits") into signing "union authorization cards."

Meanwhile, the vast majority of workers and the employer may have no idea what is happening.

Then, after union organizers collect those "authorization cards" from just 30 percent of employees in the workplace, workers would be ambushed with an union organizing election in just days -- denying independent-minded employees any time to share truthful, non-coercive information with their coworkers about the effects of unionization.

Well-funded professional union organizers regularly push for unionization behind the scenes for months (or even years) as part of their drive for more forced union dues, and under the new rules, workers wishing to remain free from union boss control would only have days to counter what could be years of union-boss propaganda being used at their workplace -- and even at their coworkers' homes.

Further, even if union bosses don't think they can win the quickie election, under the new rules they would be able to request the election in order to force the employer to hand over a list of every employee with their home address, phone number, email and shift information. Armed with this information union organizers could then withdraw the election petition and continue pursuing their coercive card check campaign.

In response, the National Right to Work Foundation has requested to address the NLRB at its public hearing next month on the proposed rule changes. If allowed, Foundation staff attorneys will argue at the hearing that the ambush elections Big Labor is pushing for would prevent independent-minded workers their right to resist forced unionization of their workplace and that the rule requiring job providers to hand over the employees' personal information to union bosses is a violation of their privacy and places them in danger of harassment at the hands of aggressive union organizers.

You can read the Foundation's request to appear at the NLRB's public meeting on behalf of independent-minded workers here (pdf).

Federal Prosecution Against Grocery Union Bosses for Widespread Rights Abuses to Proceed as Class-Action

Union officials’ illegal forced-dues scheme violated possibly thousands of workers’ rights

Phoenix, AZ (October 22, 2010) – A federal prosecution initiated by several Fry’s Food Stores workers, whose rights were abused by local union bosses during a looming strike last year, will proceed as a “class action” and will potentially affect thousands of similarly-situated employees statewide.

With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, employees from several Fry’s locations in Arizona filed federal unfair labor practice charges against the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 99 union hierarchy and Fry’s management after union and company officials continued to seize union dues from their paychecks despite repeated requests to stop.

Upset by a UFCW Local 99 boss-initiated strike threat last November, the employees resigned formal union membership and revoked their dues deduction authorizations – used by union officials to automatically withhold dues from employee paychecks – during a time in which the union did not have a contract at their workplaces.

The charges, filed by Shirley Jones of Mesa, Karen Medley and Elaine Brown of Apache Junction, Kimberly Stewart and Saloomeh Hardy of Queen Creek, and Tommy and Janette Fuentes of Florence – acting for other similarly situated employees – spurred the NLRB Regional Director in Phoenix to find that the dues deduction authorizations used by UFCW Local 99 union officials at all Arizona Fry’s Food Stores locations were illegal because they do not allow employees to revoke them once a contract terminates, as required by federal law.

Subsequently, the NLRB’s Regional Director initiated a statewide prosecution against UFCW Local 99 union bosses. However, an NLRB administrative law judge refused to uphold a subpoena of the union’s statewide records that would indicate how widespread the union’s practice of failing to honor Fry’s employees’ dues revocations really is. This week, the NLRB in Washington, D.C. overruled the judge’s decision and ordered the union to comply with the subpoena.

Read the entire release here.

In an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner, National Right to Work President Mark Mix discusses the threat to real education reform posed by teacher union bosses in Washington, DC.

Just a few weeks ago, Samuel Johnson’s centuries-old observation that a man’s knowledge he is to be hanged “concentrates his mind wonderfully” seemed quite applicable to Washington Teacher Union (WTU) President George Packer.

Of course, no one was threatening Packer with the rope or any of its modern-day equivalents when they agreed to a new contract in late June making it significantly easier for D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to dismiss ineffective teachers.

But when he signed off on the new contract, Packer, whose WTU is a subsidiary of the mammoth American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, faced a Big Labor boss’s worst nightmare, a rapid decline in the number of employees forced to pay to his union dues or fees in order to keep their jobs.

As recently as 2003, there were roughly 5,000 D.C. teachers who had to accept the WTU as their monopoly-bargaining agent and pay union dues or fees as a job condition. Today, there are barely 4,000. Despite the best efforts of Packer and AFT union czarina Randi Weingarten, that number is set to drop still further over the next few years.

Read the full op-ed here.

Over the years, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have provided free legal aid to teachers whose rights have been violated by compulsory unionism.  Read about some of these cases here, here, and here.

U.S. Supreme Court Agrees With Right to Work Foundation: Unions Have No Right to Payroll Deduction

More effective alternative would have been stopping government payroll deduction for all union dues

Washington, DC (February 24, 2009) — The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled 6-3 in Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association that states may prohibit union officials from using payroll deduction to divert government workers’ money into union coffers.

In overturning a Ninth Circuit appeals court decision and upholding an Idaho law banning payroll deduction for union political dues from state and local government employees, the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, agreed with arguments made by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys. The lower court had blocked the state from requiring local government bodies to comply with the state law.

National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys – joining with the Sutherland Institute, Utah Taxpayers Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business – successfully argued in their amicus brief (pdf) that unions, in fact, have no constitutional right to use government resources to deduct dues from workers’ paychecks.

“The Supreme Court's decision makes clear what should be obvious, that union officials have no constitutional right to use government resources to line their pockets,” said Stefan Gleason, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation. "It is bad public policy for government bodies essentially to act as bagmen for union political monies.”

(Continue reading this news release...)

Today's DC Examiner has an editorial about the Foundation's upcoming US Supreme Court case, Daniel Locke v. Karass.

Here's an excerpt from the editorial:

Locke is one of 20 Maine state employees who found that their compulsory agency fees to the Maine State Employees Association were being used to fund union lawsuits and bargaining in other states via a funding pool administered by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Locke and his like-minded colleagues objected to having to pay the fees because they knew the SEIU aggressively pushes a political agenda outside of Maine, including political campaigning, lobbying government at all levels, litigation against employers, media advocacy and other non-bargaining activities. Every dollar taken from Locke to pay for union litigation outside Maine freed up a dollar to be spent on SEIU’s political agenda.

Sounds like an open-and-shut case, right? After all, Thomas Jefferson said it was “sinful and tyrannical” to “compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves.” And just last year, the court ruled that public employee unions must first get permission from individual members before using their dues for political activities. Justice Antonin Scalia declared that “unions have no constitutional entitlement to the fees of nonmember employees.”

But things are never so simple in the nation’s capital. U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement has submitted a brief in the case in which he argues that public employee unions can indeed use agency fees to pay their share of a litigation pool.

But, he says, doing so must further the government’s interest in keeping the peace in the workplace. He also says the union must give reasonable assurance that the pool doesn’t indirectly aid non-litigation activities.

In other words, as long as there is peace in the workplace and wink-winks from the union, President Bush’s solicitor general will be happy. And this president is anti-union?

Read the whole thing here.

A recent U.S Court of Appeals ruling found several National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) union officials guilty of violating the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The decision resolved a 1994 suit brought by David Noble, a postal worker who alleged union officials -- including a former NALC president -- funneled workers' dues into unmonitored expense accounts.

Judge Williams' concurrence features some particularly choice tidbits on the NALC's corrupt practices:

"Placing union money in the officers’ hands, solely on those same officers’ bland assurances that it will be used for union business, completely subverts the [NALC constitution] clause’s obvious goal of preserving accountability."

He also chides his two colleagues on the panel for refusing to punish union officials for excessive "per diem" expenditures:

At every biennial convention after 1964, a small group of unnamed delegates received a “per diem” payment calculated on the basis of certain estimated expenses: lost wages, hotel rooms, and meals and incidentals. Noble argued in the district court that the presidentially appointed Committee on Mileage and Per Diem asked each post-1964 convention to approve these payments without informing the delegates of two facts: (1) that the union’s officers were among those receiving per diem payments, even though they continued to earn their salaries and thus had no “lost time” (unlike rank-and-file mail carriers); and (2) that the union had already paid (in full or part) for most officers’ hotel rooms, transferring the union’s hotel discount to the officers’ benefit. Thus, the members were unaware of these costs’ peculiarities — peculiarities that might well have been material to their decision.

[Emphasis added]

Full text of the decision can be found here (pdf). More Freedom@Work posts on union corruption available here, here, and here.

While the ruling is welcomed, the fact remains that regulatory oversight of unions -- rather than simply stripping union bosses of the government-granted special privileges that facilitate the corruption -- results in little more than make-work for federal bureaucrats.

The Washington Post has an interesting article up on internal divisions within the Washington, DC teacher union. The corrupt union has been in a state of turmoil since former top boss Barbara Bullock was caught embezzling millions of dollars from union funds.

From 1995 to 2002, Bullock ripped off teachers' forced dues to go on massive shopping sprees at Saks, Nieman Marcus, and Tiffany's. Unsurprisingly, Bullock funded her excessive spending by jacking up mandatory union dues.

However, getting rid of Bullock hasn't solved rank-and-file teachers' problems. Teachers, parents, and administrators are dissastified with the system, and teacher union officials are resisting any change that may result in fewer teachers in their forced dues-paying ranks.

"Reformers" are calling for more oversight and transparency, but true reform can only occur if rank-and-file teachers are given a choice to keep their hard-earned money. Only the elimination of forced dues will make it possible to hold union officials accountable.