OPINION:
This Labor Day, employees have fewer rights and union organizers have gained more organizing power since the 1940s. In an administration that has a well-earned reputation for overreach, few agencies in the executive branch have demonstrated more of it than the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB has carried the torch for Big Labor’s agenda since the card-check bill died in 2010.
The NLRB’s most imminent power grab comes in a case called Browning-Ferris, which could establish holding companies as liable for the employment practices of subcontractors and franchisees. Unions are champing at the bit, eager to use the precedent to unionize industries including franchised fast-food restaurants by making all parties “joint employers.”
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has invested about $50 million to gain a foothold in unionizing McDonald’s. Browning-Ferris offers the Obama labor board the ability to set precedents that might enable SEIU to reap a massive windfall by organizing franchisees through pressure on the franchisor. And to add insult, it could happen without employees having private, secret ballot votes.
In the face of these assaults on employee rights, there is little Congress can do right now. Attempts to disapprove the NLRB’s regulations and reverse them in the short run won’t succeed since President Obama can veto them or Democrats in the Senate can filibuster them. Past threats to defund the agency have not drawn enough congressional support. The long drawn-out court system may provide an expensive answer.
At this juncture the best track to derail this insanity once and forever is new legislation that is percolating in the area of employee (not union) rights. A totem of that long game is the Hatch-Price Employee Rights Act (ERA).
The proposed law is a widely supported reform package that goes beyond merely countering the NLRB’s anti-employee actions. And with a Republican in the White House, it will become a reality. The ERA creates an employee rights landscape that is better than the one that existed before President Obama’s appointees began implementing their union-centric agenda. And once established for a 21st century workplace, it will be very hard to reverse.
The ERA would reverse part of the Obama labor board’s “ambush elections” rule, which ordered employers to hand over personal private contact information to union organizers with no provision to allow employees to opt-out.
But its other provisions would go farther — establishing and securing rights that federal law did not protect, even in 2009. Employees would be guaranteed a voice on unionization through secret-ballot organizing votes, recertification referendums on union effectiveness, and true majority secret ballot votes without turnout-reducing shenanigans, since majorities of all employees would need to vote for the union.
Rather than publicly gathering signatures, which enables union organizers ample opportunity to deceive, mislead or intimidate employees, secret ballot votes allow employees to hear both sides and make the decision that’s best for them without fear of reprisal.
The ERA would additionally require union bosses to get affirmative, opt-in permission before using dues for political purposes. While union federal PAC contributions are opt-in, contributions to left-wing issue groups can come from the union’s dues-funded general treasury. That’s a problem for the poll-based 38-40 percent of union households who vote Republican. And there are hundreds of millions in dues money from the multibillion union treasuries that are in play for leftist causes domestically and overseas.
Finally, union carve-outs from labor rules preventing coercion of employees looking to decertify unions and from certain federal anti-racketeering laws would be closed. There are no excuses for these loopholes other than politicians serving union bosses who paid for their elections.
Even better for ERA’s long game? Broad and deep public majorities support the law’s provisions. The privacy protections, secret ballots to call strikes, and closing the union violence loophole all receive more than 80 percent support from union households as well as every demographic polled by ORC International.
This Labor Day, people who want to move employee relations forward from the 1940s-era model have a choice. They can wring their hands and complain to their peers, or they can help build momentum for the Hatch-Price reforms. It will be worth the price of a ticket to see the Democrats and union bosses dance around lame explanations as to why they oppose these rights and privileges for all employees.
• Rick Berman is president of Berman and Co., a Washington public affairs firm.
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