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Flap’s Links and Comments for June 27th on 09:59

These are my links for June 27th from 09:59 to 10:02:

  • How many new pro-union rules will the NLRB ram through in coming months? – Earlier this week, I wrote about the real world problems with the National Labor Relations Board's new proposed rules to speed up union elections, which would punish small businesses in an attempt to expand union membership. Having written about the rules themselves, it's also worth elaborating on the insane process the NLRB is using to ram them through, which undercuts President Obama's own transparency guidance.

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    Read it all….

    First, some context. Currently, there's a three-to- one Democratic majority on the NLRB. In August, the current chair Wilma Liebman's term will expire. Later in the year, the term of recess-appointed union lawyer Craig Becker will also expire. That would bring the board's composition down to a one-to-one deadlock. Given that Republicans have taken an increasingly adversarial stance toward the NLRB in wake of its general counsel's move to sue Boeing for building a nonunion factory in South Carolina, it's unlikely that the pro-union bloc will ever get stronger than it is now. So there's a tremendous incentive for the board to ram through as many union-friendly rules as possible as quickly as possible.

    That seems to be the impetus for the expedited process they're using to advance the proposed "quickie election" rules. In the lone dissent in the decision to propose the rules (which you can download here), Brian Hayes explains in detail how the board is disregarding Obama's pledges for transparency by pushing through the rules without giving the affected parties enough time to provide input.

  • The Boeing complaint should be decided, not settled – The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should take a break from pressuring the Boeing Company to settle that agency’s “loony left” complaint (“The Economist,” May 19, 2011), which seeks to prevent Boeing from producing additional 787 aircraft in its non-union plant in South Carolina.  A settlement would protect from judicial review the imprudence of the agency’s complaint and leave standing a legal theory that it can thereafter use at the behest of organized labor to deprive less financially resourceful employers of the ability to make fundamental business decisions long protected by law. 

    The loss of 9,000 jobs in South Carolina today is just the beginning.  After all, why invest in a country where the government has declared unlawful a business’s decision to open a non-union second production line to protect the company’s continued production from the economic consequences of union-encouraged strikes? 

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    Decide it and then throw Obama out of office to change the NLRB