Here’s an update on National Right to Work’s ongoing effort to hold Big Labor-affiliated Obama appointees accountable.

Following the initial round of filings, National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys have now filed supplements to their motions asking National Labor Relations Board Member Craig Becker to recuse himself from pending cases.  In addition to the former SEIU and AFL-CIO union lawyer’s clear bias and hostility toward the Foundation, Becker’s signed Ethics Pledge should preclude his participation in cases in which he and his clients had direct involvement.  The relevant portion of the Ethics Pledge:

I will not for a period of 2 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.

In one of the cases in which Becker should recuse himself, SEIU affiliate Service Workers United have asked the NLRB to overturn the landmark 2007 decisions Dana Corp.  Won by Foundation attorneys, Dana held that workers have 45 days to demand a secret ballot election to toss out an unwanted union after the union achieved monopoly bargaining status through the intimidating card check process.

But Becker actually submitted a legal brief to the Board on behalf of the AFL-CIO and UAW in that very case.   It would be highly unethical for Becker to rule on the validity of a prior Board case in which he served as counsel.

While his controversial nomination was stalled in the Senate, Becker also promised to recuse himself from cases involving his former employer, the radical SEIU union.  The real test of his ethics, however, comes with cases involving SEIU affiliates and locals.

As Foundation attorney Glenn Taubman explains in one of the motion supplements, in the 2009 Supreme Court case Locke v. Karass the SEIU International (Becker’s former employer until the very day of his recess appointment) admitted to operating "a ‘pooling’ scheme to fund, and thereby control, the litigation of all of its local unions."  

In the present case, Foundation attorneys have asked the NLRB to review a case involving SEIU Local 121RN union officials’ threats to nurses of financial penalties and even arrest for refusing to abandon their patients during a union-ordered strike.  

Will Becker adhere to the plain language of the ethics pledge and recuse himself from these cases which are substantially related to his former employment?  Unfortunately, the precedent in the Obama Administration isn’t encouraging.

The May/June 2010 issue of Foundation Action is now available for download as a PDF. This is the Foundation’s official bimonthly publication that provides an excellent overview of hard-hitting legal actions being taken by Foundation attorneys every day to combat forced unionism.

This issue’s top story details why Foundation attorneys have demanded Craig Becker, President Barack Obama’s radical recess appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, to recuse himself in 15 pending cases due to his open hostility to the Foundation and independent-minded employees.

Also in this issue:

• Illinois Providers Challenge Big Labor Payback Scheme
• Help Defend Individual Freedom Through Your Estate Plans
• Spotlight on Erin Smith, Foundation Staff Attorney
• UFCW Union Bosses Trick Workers into Paying Full Union Dues
• Sticky-Fingered Union Bosses Caught in PAC Fundraising Scheme

In addition to to reading Foundation Action online, you can sign up to receive a free subscription by mail here.

Regular Freedom@Work readers may remember a spate of Obama Administration executive orders designed to enhance Big Labor’s already-extensive special privileges. Today, the Department of Labor published a final rule implementing Executive Order 13496, which requires government contractors to post notices informing employees of their workplace rights.

At first glance, that seems pretty innocuous. However, when it comes to the union boss-dominated Obama Department of Labor, "innocuous" isn’t part of the equation. Here’s part of the Department of Labor’s explanation of the notice’s content in yesterday’s Federal Register (emphasis mine):

The final notice retains the provision stating that an employee has the right to not join or remain a member of a union that represents the employee’s bargaining unit. However, the OLMS notes, “further explication of Beck rights will not be included because of space limitations and because of the policy choice, as expressed in Executive Order 13496, to revoke a more explicit notice to employees of Beck rights.”

"Beck rights" refer to the Right to Work Foundation-won Supreme Court decision Communication Workers v. Beck, which guarantees the right of employees to opt-out of union dues for politics, lobbying, and other activities unrelated to workplace bargaining. Although workers in non-Right to Work states can still be forced to pay for union ‘representation’, they cannot be forced to subsidize union activities that go beyond the scope of negotiating with management.

Many workers remain unaware of their right to opt-out of objectionable union dues, but the Administration’s notice avoids any mention of Beck rights. It also does not mention the right to seek decertification of a monopoly bargaining agent or the right to abstain from both union membership and payment of any union dues in Right to Work states. In other words, the new notice intentionally, as a matter of White House policy, keeps workers in the dark about their basic rights, leaving them vulnerable to union bosses who have no qualms about extracting forced dues to fund political activism, lobbying, and members-only activities.

Workers in non-Right to Work states can still be forced to pay union dues just to get or keep a job, so posting Beck notices is no panacea. But informing workers of all of their rights – not just their rights to join or organize a union – provides a modicum of protection against Big Labor’s well-known proclivity for redirecting unsuspecting workers’ dues to political and lobbying slush funds. Unfortunately, this skewed notice is yet more evidence that the Obama White House and Department of Labor are more interested in stacking the deck in Big Labor’s favor than protecting employee rights.

After spending billions of dollars to get Obama and other pro-forced unionism politicians elected, Big Labor is once again reaping its reward through a series of favorable executive orders.

Today, National Right to Work President Mark Mix was published in the Investor’s Business Daily exposing how General Motors (GM) and United Autoworker (UAW) union bosses colluded to use taxpayer dollars to "pay back" the taxpayers for the government bail out it received last year:

…GM leaders and the UAW officials who colluded with them to extract $43 billion out of taxpayers in exchange for arguably worthless stock are now patting themselves on the back for paying back on April 21 the balance of a $6.7 billion loan they took out from taxpayers as part of the 2009 bankruptcy package.

In a weekly radio address to the nation late last month, President Obama suggested that the fact that taxpayers have now recouped 14% of the taxes he diverted into GM coffers on their behalf vindicates his decision to bail out GM and the UAW brass.

But ordinary Americans, with whom the GM and Chrysler bailouts have become overwhelmingly unpopular over the past year, are unlikely to agree. Especially not if they learn that GM was able to "pay back" the loan only because it had not yet spent all of the other $43 billion in taxpayer money it raked in last year.

But, as Mix further notes, the mirage that GM and UAW officials are being fiscally responsible with the taxpayer’s money is just part of their plan to ask for even more money from the government:

…[T]he apparent motive of Obama-selected GM CEO Ed Whitacre and UAW officials in repaying the $6.7 billion now is to pave the way for the company to secure a new $10 billion loan from taxpayers at an interest rate of just 5%, two points lower than the previous rate, to pay for the retooling of its plants to meet the government’s new, stricter fuel-economy standards.

If the GM/UAW "zombie" corporation obtains the new $10 billion government loan, it will end up even more deeply in hock to taxpayers than before, after having gotten good PR and kudos from the president for having paid off its original loan "in full."

Fortunately, the American people are not as easily bamboozled as President Obama and his cohorts in the GM and UAW union hierarchies seem to think they are.

Mix concludes that "the president’s fork-tongued reassurances that all is going well with the bailouts are likely to make Americans angrier and angrier as time goes on" because his special deals and political paybacks to his Big Labor buddies are more than American families can bear, and serves no purpose other than to enrich Big Labor’s coffers.

At Freedom@Work, we’ve spent plenty of time documenting the many problems of public sector forced unionism, including the fiscal abyss it is plunging state and local governments into. But even reports of an impending budget crisis don’t have quite the same impact as a video of teacher union militants demanding more tax dollars:

As George Will notes in his latest Newsweek column, eventually, the bills come due. California’s looming budget crisis is largely the result of public sector union bosses, whose profligate spending risks pushing the entire state into bankruptcy:

California’s parlous condition owes much to burdensome health-care and pension promises negotiated with public employees’ unions, promises that are suffocating the state’s economic growth.

. . .
They [public sector unions] are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself for ever-larger portions of wealth extracted by the taxing power from the private sector.

Unfortunately, this trend threatens to spread other states. For the first time ever, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that public sector unionization outstrips private sector unionization, as Big Labor increasingly turns to government to bolster its forced-dues-paying ranks. The financial consequences of this development could be dire (emphasis mine):

Fred Siegel, a visiting professor of history at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute . . . said, “There were enormous political ramifications” to the fact that public-sector workers are now the majority in organized labor.

“At the same time the country is being squeezed, public-sector unions are a rising political force in the Democratic Party,” he said. “They depend on extra money for the public sector,and that puts the Democrats in a difficult position. In four big states — New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California — the public-sector unions have largely been untouched by the economic downturn. In those states, you have an impending clash between the public-sector unions and the public at large.”

As union operatives become more entrenched at every level of government their immense special privileges allow them to corral more money for extortionate dues payments. As a result, taxes go up and public services become more expensive, leaving over-burdened taxpayers to foot the bill.

The latest Big Labor scheme to accelerate this trend is the Police and Firefighters Monopoly Bargaining Bill, which which would leave state and local public safety employees at the mercy of Big Labor organizing drives. Once Big Labor bosses are firmly in control of public safety organizations, they’ll be able to use their influence over firefighters and police departments to further entrench their monopoly bargaining powers. 

Last week, Joseph Rago noted in the Wall Street Journal the latest union boss payoff by the Obama Administration (emphasis added):

White House payoffs to big labor are by now routine, though rarely are they this transparent: This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius rolled out a new program that, scrubbed down, amounts to a slush fund for union health plans.

When Democrats realized that ObamaCare’s approval numbers were sagging, they loaded the bill up with "early deliverables"—programs that would go into effect immediately, rather than the five or more years of delay used to hide the bill’s true costs. One of those early deliverables was $5 billion in subsidies to early retirees aged 55 to 64 who incur annual health costs over $15,000.

Ms. Sebelius did her best to dress this reinsurance program up in a public-interest blanket, but many of the 3.3 million eligible retirees are ex-union workers who extracted generous benefits from some of America’s most hardpressed industries. Businesses that doled out these unaffordable promises will be delighted with the federal handout, taxpayers less so. And also eligible are retired state and local public employees, as well as certain health-care trusts like one recently set up by the United Auto Workers, which has an estimated 30 cents in cash for every dollar of expected claims.

National Right to Work president Mark Mix called ObamaCare a "a Trojan Horse for more forced unionization" in the Journal last September.  Among other hidden payoffs to Big Labor, Mix noted the discretionary authority given to Sebelius and a provision to bail out insolvent union health-care plans.  

This latest scheme is unsurprising.  And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

National Right to Work staff attorneys have filed a formal amicus curiae brief supporting an appeal in US District Court that challenges a California project labor agreement (PLA) that gives construction union officials new tools to coerce employees and employers who look to bid and perform state-funded construction projects.

Arguing that a PLA between the Rancho Santiago Community College District and a union illegally discriminated against construction workers who exercise their right to refrain from union membership, Foundation attorneys are defending the interests of the vast majority of construction employees in California who have opted against unionization.

Rancho Santiago and the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council (CTC) union entered into the PLA in 2004, which effectively precluded nonunion apprentices and contractors from working on over 50 construction projects funded by the public agency worth over $300 million. The Foundation-supported appeal challenges this and similar policies to open up the bidding process to all construction workers and contractors.

With the Police and Firefighters Monopoly Bargaining Bill looming on the horizon, here’s a portent of things to come from the Cal Watchdog blog:

North Bay firefighters launched a boycott of a Napa Valley winery this weekend after its owner criticized their wages and benefits in a letter published in the St. Helena Star. But more than a boycott was launched, as the winery owner has received veiled threats online from some public safety employees, potentially refusing to fight a fire at his home or winery, or save him from choking in a restaurant.

A concerned winery owner has the temerity to point out that public sector union bosses have bankrupted California. In return, he’s threatened by union operatives who say they’ll refuse to fight a fire at his home or place of business. The union militants’ reaction is all the more thuggish in light of the original letter to the editor, which is about as mild as political criticism gets, putting the blame squarely on the politicians:

Napa Valley winery owner Dario Sattui of V. Sattui Winery wrote a letter to the Editor of the St. Helena Star, venting about the benefits and pensions that firefighters receive. In his April 9 letter, Sattui wrote, “I thought I was doing well in the wine business. Had I had any real brains I would have become a firefighter. What a racket they have. While I respect the work they do and the inherent dangers, they are greatly overpaid, work only two days a week (a third of which they sleep) and get to retire at 50 years old at 90 percent of their pay after working 30 years. I don’t blame the firefighters. Good for them for getting as much as they can. The blame goes to the politicians and the government administrators. What do they care? It isn’t their money.”

The skyrocketing costs of public services are an inevitable consequence of public sector unionization, which relentlessly expands government and drives up taxes. Union operatives’ threat to ignore a fire at the winery owner’s home also highlights the dangers of the Police and Firefighters Monopoly Bargaining Bill, which would leave state and local public safety employees at the mercy of Big Labor organizing drives. Once Big Labor bosses are firmly in control of public safety organizations, they’ll have no qualms about leveraging their influence over firefighters and police departments to threaten anyone who dares to question their monopoly bargaining powers. 

Gov. Quinn Faces Class-Action Suit for Executive Order Designed to Unionize Home-Care Providers

National Right to Work Foundation attorneys assist home-based personal care providers pushed into union’s forced-dues ranks against their will

Chicago, IL (April 22, 2010) – With free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation attorneys, a group of home-based personal care providers today filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court against Governor Pat Quinn and union officials for their efforts to force Illinois personal care providers under unwanted union boss control.

The suit stems from an executive order issued by disgraced former-Governor Rod Blagojevich shortly after his election, later codified, in which over 20,000 personal care providers who care for individuals with disabilities were designated as “public employees” of the state of Illinois for the purpose of granting Service Employees International Union (SEIU) bosses monopoly “representation” and forced dues privileges over them.

Following the Rod Blagojevich blueprint of forced unionism, Quinn signed an executive order last June that made an additional 4,500 home-based personal care providers susceptible to unwanted union boss bargaining and political “representation.” Not coincidentally, Quinn received the SEIU union bosses’ political endorsement and support during his recent closely-contested primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor.

The additional 4,500 home-care providers who are not yet under union control soundly rejected union membership by a two-to-one margin in a mail-in vote. However, per Quinn’s executive order, the home-care providers may again be subject to out-of-state SEIU and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union organizers making “home visits” attempting to organize the home-care providers through coercive “card check” unionization tactics.

Pam Harris, Gordon Stiefel, and several other home-care providers — with assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation — filed the federal suit on behalf of all of Illinois’s providers unionized by Blagojevich and on behalf of home-care providers threatened by forced unionism as a result of Quinn’s executive order.

“My primary concern is that someone else will be telling me how to best care for my son,” said Harris, who provides personal care for her adult son and is the lead plaintiff in the suit. “Union dues would be a deduction from what we have available to provide for my son’s needs. And then I would be giving my money to a union to exercise their political muscle on issues I may vehemently disagree with.”

Click here to read the whole release.

A copy of the complaint can be downloaded (pdf) by clicking here.

Right to Work President Mark Mix appeared on "The Gary Nolan Show" to explain how Project Labor Agreements enrich union bosses. 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.