Over the Labor Day weekend, columns by National Right to Work president Mark Mix appeared in newspapers across the country and online exposing Big Labor’s power grabs and coercive practices over American workers.

In Investor’s Business Daily Mix highlighted the extremism and ethics problems of Craig Becker, the Service Employee International Union’s (SEIU) inside man at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):

In the face of bipartisan opposition, Obama bypassed Congress and installed Becker at the NLRB through a recess appointment. Now that he’s established at the head of an agency responsible for overseeing American labor law, Becker is poised to expand Big Labor’s privileges even further.

Faced with apparent conflicts of interests brought to light by the National Right to Work Foundation, Becker quickly downplayed any connection to the SEIU, his longtime employer. Despite crafting legal strategies on behalf of that union for much of his career, Becker refused to recuse himself from several NLRB cases involving the SEIU’s local affiliates.

Despite his relatively brief tenure, Becker’s biases are already evident. In one recent case, Becker wrote that the board should consider waiving rules that require union bosses to provide workers with independently audited breakdowns of union expenditures.

On National Review Online, Mix outlined union militants’ stealth to bypass Congress to implement radical changes to labor law that grant new special privileges to union bosses at the expense of hardworking Americans:

By cramming the NLRB full of forced-unionism operatives, Obama has successfully laid the groundwork for a stealthy push to undermine the rights of American workers. The NLRB’s administrative agenda and electronic-voting schemes now threaten to undo much of the hard work that went into defeating card-check legislation.

Some doubt that such sweeping changes could be enacted without congressional approval, but we’ve already seen Big Labor’s strategy in action. The National Mediation Board (NMB), a federal agency that governs airline and railway employees, has just enacted a far-reaching rule change that allows for workplace unionization without the consent of a true majority of employees.

Mix exposed Big Labor’s plot to monopolize government-sector workers in the Washington Times:

The outsized power and privileges of government union bosses clearly are a major force behind the unsustainable growth of government payrolls. According to data furnished by respected labor economists Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, nonunion government employment nationwide actually fell by 2 percent, but Big Labor-controlled government employment grew by nearly 4 percent from 2007 to 2009.

Government union bosses’ success in expanding the ranks of employees under their monopoly bargaining power – even as private-sector and nonunion government payrolls have shrunk – spells trouble for the future of the American economy. Our country simply must reverse the long-term trend in which the growth of government-union employment far exceeds that of private-sector employment in good and bad times alike.

Otherwise, American taxpayers and businesses are destined to face ever-more-onerous tax burdens to pay for bigger and bigger government in the decades to come.

Finally, in local newspapers nationwide including the Duluth News Tribune, Mix warned that no worker is safe from the union moguls’ designs:

Take Major Stephen Godin, a retired Marine who has instructed ROTC in Worcester, MA, for 15 years. Major Godin’s dedicated service to his country and his students deserves our respect and gratitude.

But three months ago, Massachusetts Teachers Association union officials threatened his dismissal for not paying union dues, even though he is not a member of the union. Because Massachusetts lacks a Right to Work law making union association strictly voluntary, nonmembers can be forced to pay some fees to a union as a condition of employment.

Public outcry prompted the governor to exempt ROTC instructors from forced-dues requirements, but other teachers across the state still labor under compulsory unionism.

Mark Mix also appeared on nationally syndicated and local radio shows coast-to-coast.

National Right to Work Committee Vice President Doug Stafford discussed the importance of employee freedom on The Frank Beckman Show this Labor Day. Click here to listen or use the embedded player below.

As always, you can also listen to the Foundation’s podcast via iTunes or manually subscribe to the feed.  

Last week, the National Mediation Board ordered a union "representation" election for Delta Air Lines flight attendants. The NMB will conduct the election under its new controversial rules approved by the two former union officials who now comprise a majority of the board.

The new procedure stacks the deck in favor of unionization by granting a union monopoly bargaining power over railway or airline industry workers if the union acquires support from just a bare majority of workers who turnout for an election, no matter how few actually vote.

But Delta flight attendants, and other workers in the airline and railway industries who could soon find themselves in similar situations, won’t know that by reading the Frequently Asked Questions page on the NMB’s website.

28. Q: How do voters vote no?

A: If a voter does not wish to be represented, they should not call the TEV telephone number or access the NMB’s Internet voting website.

As National Right to Work Foundation staff attorney Glenn Taubman explains in a letter to the NMB (PDF), this is false and should be immediately corrected so workers can vote in accordance with the rule change.

It’s not like the Obama Administration has a habit of keeping independent-minded employees in the dark about their rights or anything…

In The Washington Examiner, Right to Work President Mark Mix takes on the Federal Election Commission’s lax oversight of suspicious Big Labor political fundraising:

Imagine the outcry if McDonalds executives demanded that franchise owners collect “voluntary” contributions totaling $25,000 for the company’s Political Action Committee (PAC) from employees at every restaurant.

What if the fast food titan’s headquarters followed up with a threat – pay us, or face a $37,500 fine? Do you think this heavy handed scheme would raise a few eyebrows at the Federal Election Commission (FEC)?

Replace “McDonalds” with “SEIU” in that description and you’ve got a pretty good idea of Big Labor’s latest political fundraising strategy. To meet their ambitious fundraising targets, Service Employees International Union bosses are now threatening to fine any local affiliate that doesn’t meet its PAC contribution requirements.

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.

Today, House Republican leader John Boehner called on President Barack Obama to veto any controversial legislation that passes during the post-midterm election lame-duck Congressional session. One of those controversial bills is the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill.

As Right to Work Foundation legal director Ray J. LaJeunesse details in the Spring 2010 issue of the Texas Review of Law & Politics journal, this draconian bill’s three primary provisions contain many injustices toward American workers and job providers.

Regarding the bill’s provision to strip workers of their rights to a secret ballot election and opening them up to intimidating "home visits":

…the absence of a formal election process works an obvious unfairness, facilitates intimidation and deception of workers, and runs contrary to the American tradition of secret ballots and the freedom to vote in privacy. The United States Supreme Court has already spoken to the issue, recognizing that “secret elections are generally the most satisfactory—indeed the preferred—method of ascertaining whether a union has majority support.”

There also is a serious question whether EFCA will unconstitutionally deny employers and employees their free speech rights… Because there would be no open campaign leading up to a secret-ballot election, EFCA would eliminate open debate, thus curtailing the speech rights of employers and individual employees opposed to the union.

As for the unconstitutational, government-mandated binding arbitration provision:

Mandatory governmentally-imposed binding interest arbitration… runs afoul of various provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

Moreover, in requiring governmentally-imposed arbitrators to dictate contract terms, EFCA would unconstitutionally take the property of employers and give that property to their employees (as wages, for example) for a non-public use, in violation of the takings clause…

And finally, regarding the lopsided nature of the penalties imposed on job providers:

These drastic new penalties for unfair labor practices that apply to employers but not to unions raise concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and may violate the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

These one-sided changes in the NLRA’s remedial scheme would adversely affect employees as well as employers. With the Damoclean sword of punitive remedies looming, employers faced with union organizing campaigns will be more likely to gag themselves to avoid unfair labor practice charges by unions, thus depriving employees of the “information opposing unionization,” which they have an implicit “right to receive” under NLRA section 7, and which is necessary to make an informed and free choice about whether to support unionization or not.

As LaJeunesse clearly explains, the Card Check Forced Unionism Bill certainly "presents serious legal and policy issues" indeed.

The full article is published in the Texas Review of Law & Politics Vol. 14, No. 2.

In her latest syndicated column, Michelle Malkin highlights the National Right to Work Foundation’s request that Attorney General Eric Holder investigate National Labor Relations Board Member Craig Becker for violating his ethics pledge by participating in cases involving his former employer, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

As Malkin notes, Becker’s weak standard for recusal rests on a faulty distinction between the national union and its local affiliates.

It’s no surprise that Becker now refuses to hold himself accountable for the ethics pledge he himself signed in April. As the past two years have taught us, Team Obama’s operational slogan is: Rules are for fools. The contractual ethics commitment states: "I will not for a period of two years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts." Yet, Becker has participated in numerous NLRB cases involving the SEIU and its affiliates — and is parsing the definition of "former employer" by arguing that local SEIU chapters are "separate and distinct legal entities" that don’t fall under the ethics rules.

The National Right to Work Foundation, which has fought both national and local SEIU officials in court on behalf of rank-and-file workers’ rights, eviscerates Becker’s lawyerly blather. SEIU’s own constitution considers local affiliates "constituent subordinate bodies" of the national union, the foundation notes. "Moreover, in 2009 over 85 percent of the SEIU’s receipts came from a per capita tax on the locals’ membership dues and fees. The national union even has the power to assume control over its locals if they do not conform to International policies."

Malkin also rightly ties Becker’s installment onto the federal labor board into the Obama Administration’s pattern of granting special privileges and hidden paybacks to the union bosses.

Read Malkin’s entire column here and more from our Freedom@Work blog on Craig Becker here and here.