Wednesday's Daily Labor Report (subscription required) featured a self-serving article likely placed by the National Labor Relations Board's PR flacks in which the two remaining board members assert that the NLRB "might actually be functioning more efficiently" with three vacancies than with a full five-member panel. Hmmm. Perhaps Congress should take another look at the NLRB's excessive funding levels.

We at Freedom @ Work also take issue with a false claim by the Board contained in the article:

Applying current board precedent, regardless of whether either of the two members disagrees with it and thinks it should be overturned, "hasn't been difficult, because as usual we generally try to decide cases based on extant board law," [Chairman Peter] Schaumber said. The two members explained that they are following longstanding board policy not to make new law or set new rules without at least a three-member majority voting for the change.

Oops, Mr. Schaumber. Not so. Just a few weeks ago, the two-member Board issued a controversial ruling which changed the law and further encouraged union-stooge congressmen to engage in deception and union coercion. As a Foundation press release explained (emphasis mine):

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued a controversial and ground-breaking ruling that gives Congressmen and other public officials the green light to stage fake “certification” ceremonies that give the misimpression of official government recognition of a union during “card check” organizing drives.

The case dismissed objections to the conduct of Congressman Robert Andrews (D-NJ) and other government officials who participated in a televised sham union “certification” ceremony and public announcement that workers had selected a union immediately prior to a NLRB certification election last summer at the Trump Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City.

The NLRB’s ruling raised the burden of proof requirements for arguing that conduct tainted a certification election. Earlier Board law did not require challengers to present incontrovertible evidence that many employees were actually aware of the objectionable conduct – only that it was likely that many were.

Either Schaumber was confused when deciding this Trump Plaza Hotel case, or he's being disingenuous to the press.

Last time we wrote about Wilma Liebman -- National Labor Relations Board Member and unabashed promoter of compulsory unionism -- she was trashing freedom of choice for employees during hearings before Congress.

This time the NLRB Member has taken her activism to a new forum to complain about what she considers an over emphasis on individual rights. In an article in the Journal of Labor and Society, Liebman concentrates her shrill rhetoric on what she sees, God forbid, as a shift in favor of an "individual rights regime."

The screed contains much whining about a series of NLRB decisions in which Liebman dissented from the majority, but ultimately only on the last page of her article are her true motivations clearly revealed:

[A]n exclusive orientation toward an individual-rights regime could have troubling political and social consequences.Workers may view the employment relationship in purely individual terms and may fail to grasp common economic interests and the potential of collective action at work, as well as in the public sphere. Collective action at work encourages engagement in the community and in politics. Without a functioning collective bargaining system, fundamental economic issues are placed off the table: distribution of wealth, control, and direction of economic enterprises. What institution will be as effective in efforts to minimize the randomness of fortune of democratic capitalism? And without a strong independent trade union movement, what institution will stand effectively as a counterweight in our democracy to the growing political influence of corporations? What institution will speak for working people—indeed for the middle class—as effectively?

So there you have it. Liebman's real motivation is politics pure and simple. Liebman, one of only two members currently on the five-member Board, wants to promote forced unionism over individual rights as a means to a political end (in her case that end would seem to be socialist economic policies).

She believes our nation's labor laws should be further contorted to promote what she claims are employees' "common economic interests." Nevermind that a group of workers for a single employer -- let alone the entire "middle class" -- will never all have the same interests or values, making it impossible for any institution to speak for them all.

All this raises a fundamental issue in that Foundation-won Supreme Court precedents have affirmed the free speech right of employees to refrain from union politics. If, as Liebman asserts, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) collective bargaining scheme is about promoting politics -- or as she calls it "collective action... in the public sphere" -- then the entire NLRA is not compatible with the Constitutional free speech and freedom of association rights of workers (which would certainly explain her disdain for any emphasis on individual rights).

Unfortunately for employees hoping to have their individual rights protected, Liebman will be on the Board at least until 2011.

In a disturbing move that further underscores the Bush administration's mismanagement of the National Labor Relations Board, NLRB General Counsel Ronald Meisburg has inexplicably added activist Democrat Dennis Walsh to his staff in recent days. Walsh is a militant union-boss partisan who had just vacated an expired recess appointment to the five member NLRB -- a recess appointment that he should never have received from President Bush in the first place. Rather than receiving a make-work job within the bureaucracy while he pines away for yet another Board seat, Walsh should instead return to private employment. As a voting member, Walsh had worked to undermine employee free choice and to empower union bosses to coerce workers into union ranks. It's outrageous that he would be rewarded with a new post at Bush's NLRB.

Right to Work attorneys this week won a ruling at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stating that union officials cannot force nonunion workers to object twice simply to receive basic information about how union affiliates spend their forced union dues.

However, as noted on Labor Day, the window of opportunity for the Bush NLRB to undo the damgage to employee freedom done by the agency during the Clinton years is closing quickly.