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).