Washington, DC – The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, a charitable organization that provides free legal assistance to employees nationwide, sent a letter to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protesting the agency’s decision to threaten lawsuits against state ballot amendments aimed at prohibiting ‘card check’ organizing drives but not threaten suits against state laws that aid unions.
The letter, signed by Foundation Legal Director Raymond LaJeunesse, points out that this latest move reveals a troubling pattern of forced unionism favoritism at the NLRB, which is charged with overseeing private sector labor and employment law throughout the country.
LaJeunesse notes that in numerous other cases where federal statutes preempt state law, the current NLRB has failed to act if asserting federal prerogatives would mean undermining union officials’ special privileges.
For example, Foundation attorneys currently represent Carol Jean Badertscher, a nurse who was threatened with fines and jail time under California’s draconian ‘anti-strikebreaker’ law for crossing a union picket line. Although the NLRB’s then General Counsel acknowledged that the California law is preempted by the National Labor Relations Act, the Board declined to declare the anti-strikebreaker law preempted or order notice to California workers about their rights to continue working during a strike.
However, the Board recently threatened four high-profile lawsuits against Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah for enacting laws designed to prohibit recognition of unions without an NLRB-supervised secret ballot election.
Those threats highlight a pattern of forced unionism favoritism that further tars the Board’s reputation for evenhandedness. The most notable example of this trend was the recess appointment of Craig Becker, a former SEIU lawyer, to serve on the Board. Despite the involvement of his former employer in several pending cases, Becker has refused to recuse himself and is now poised to issue rulings that could shape American labor law for decades.
“The Board’s selective interest in asserting federal prerogatives is just the latest example of this Administration’s obvious forced unionism bias,” said Foundation Legal Information Director Patrick Semmens. “The Obama NLRB rushed to intervene when it meant stopping state attempts to limit coercive card check organizing drives. But in cases where federal preemption would mean striking down state laws that push more workers into unions’ forced dues-paying ranks, the Board is conspicuously silent.”
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.
