Though it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as other high-profile appointments, President Obama has recently nominated several new members to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a federal agency which oversees private sector labor relations and the federal policy of forced unionism.

These appointments have far-reaching implications for employee freedom, so it’s important that NLRB nominees are thoroughly vetted before they take office.

Unfortunately, Obama’s latest choice for the NLRB, Craig Becker, has radical views on the extent of union coercive power, and he comes directly out of the all-powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) whose bosses have been as thick as thieves with the notoriously corrupt Big Labor front group ACORN. Here’s The Wall Street Journal on Becker’s troubling history and his role in drafting Obama executive orders while on the SEIU union payroll:

One of Big Labor’s priorities in Washington is to place allies in key government jobs where they can overturn existing labor policy without battles in Congress. This is a very good reason for the Senate to hold a hearing on the nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Mr. Becker is associate general counsel at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is most recently in the news for its close ties to Acorn, the disgraced housing shakedown operation. President Obama nominated Mr. Becker in April to the five-member NLRB, which has the critical job of supervising union elections, investigating labor practices, and interpreting the National Labor Relations Act. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, Mr. Becker argued for rewriting current union-election rules in favor of labor. And he suggested the NLRB could do this by regulatory fiat, without a vote of Congress.

Read the whole thing here. As a member of the NLRB, Becker will be in a position to rewrite American labor law and achieve his stated goals of marginalizing employees from the process of deciding whether they are unionized. Allies of worker freedom should be extremely concerned about this nomination.

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Previous Foundation coverage of Becker’s radical views can be found here, here and here.