By Washington Examiner Editorial
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka boasted during a February news conference that hes at the White House a couple times a week two three times a week. Trumka added that he has conversations every day with someone at the White House or in the administration.
On Monday we learned conclusively that when the AFL-CIOs Richard Trumka speaks White House officials listen. His words come as a dog whistle to President Obama who never misses an opportunity to reward his biggest campaign donors.
The evidence became public with the National Labor Relations Boards announcement of proposed new rules for workplace representation elections in the private sector. This is the same NLRB trying to use Boeing to strike fear in the minds of all corporate leaders who might be thinking of moving some or all of their operations to right-to-work states.
The aircraft makers sin was to build a new plant in South Carolina to fill orders for its new 787 Dreamliner that couldnt be handled by its unionized work force in Seattle. If the NLRB succeeds in reversing the Boeing expansion it will effectively put federal bureaucrats -- assisted by union bosses like Trumka -- in charge of corporate investment planning across America as is done in European welfare states with their stagnant job-killing economies.
The new workplace representation election rules are needed to remove unnecessary barriers to the fair and expeditious resolution of questions concerning representation according to the NLRB. Unions want the NLRB to severely limit or kill managements ability to oppose unionization before representation elections and to expose abusive campaign practices by union thugs after workers vote. Apparently the Big Labor bosses arent satisfied with winning more than 60 percent of workplace representation elections in recent years.
Less than 7 percent of all private-sector workers are unionized. Trumkas problem isnt that he and his cohorts arent winning enough representation elections once they are held but rather that they have immense difficulties persuading the requisite 30 percent of a targeted work force to sign petitions calling for elections. About 60 days currently elapse between submission of a union petition for an election and the voting. Its not clear from the material released by the board Monday how much the new procedures would shorten the time between petition and election. In fact nobody really knows whether management or labor would benefit more from an abbreviated campaign.
So what Big Labors NLRB allies really want is likely found in the proposals provision granting the board unilateral discretion to deny review of post-election rulings -- the same discretion now exercised concerning pre-election rulings. That would allow NLRB to ignore postelection evidence presented by management of union campaign abuses. That would amount to a free pass for union thugs to intimidate workers into signing petitions calling for unionization. Its yet another illustration of the Obama brand of gangster government at work for his union friends.
