You might recall that with great fanfare and the slobberingly positive coverage by the Old Media, President Obama made Reagan-like and claimed that he thought it was time to get rid of the regulations strangling American business. Since that time he’s met with businesses and pretended to suddenly be a pro-business, pro-economic growth president. His actions, however, give the lie to his sudden turn around from anti-business to pro-business man. Thankfully the GOP is making to help the president become what he’s selling himself as, despite his best intentions.
One of those ways that the GOP is assisting Obama to become business friendly — no matter how much Obama hates the idea — was announced last week by John Kline and the Republicans of the Education and the Workforce Committee of the House of Representatives.
Subcommittee Chairman Phil Roe, M.D. (R-TN) announced the closer scrutiny that the GOP intends to level upon the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that is supposed to act as a mediator for disputes between labor. That closer scrutiny is a result of Obama’s appointees moving the NLRB from mediator between business and labor to outright advocate in favor of Big Labor.
Showing what he truly thinks of the business sector, Obama’s NLRB has been punishing businesses as much as possible and attacking worker’s rights in the process. By making labor friendly rules changes and using the office as an activist tool to take business to court to force them to accede to labor demands, all things that has never been done on such a scale before.
Obama’s NLRB has made several key rules changes that the GOP members of the committee say shows that it is, “eager to tilt the playing field in favor of powerful special interests against the interests of rank-and-file workers.”
Here are just a few of the things that the NLRB has done since Obama stocked the office full of former Big Labor employees and their lawyers.
- Essentially ended the decades old ban on “secondary boycotts” by allowing banners to be placed in front of businesses not involved in any labor dispute. A secondary boycott is when union agitators picket and attack the business of someone for whom they do not work but who does business with their employer. The goal here is for the union attackers to make associates of their own employer want to cease doing business with the union member’s place of employment to pressure their employer to accede to their demands. Sort of a guilt by association attack on the innocent, unconnected business. This used to be illegal until Obama’s labor hacks infested the NLRB.
- The NLRB decided that it now controls the child care centers of churches and religious institutions. No law change or act of Congress needed. They just decided out of hand that they now control all the kids in Churches.
- The NLRB wants to allow unions to try to organize a business not just by company but by job type. Instead of having to convince an entire company to unionize or not, the NLRB wants to allow unions to come in and unionize as few as 3 employees who happen to have the same job title and/or duties. This will allow unions to piecemeal a business to death and will make it far easier to organize when you don’t have to convince hundreds of employees to vote yes, but only need 2 or 3 to say yes and the place is automatically unionized.
- Changed rules to force employers to act as a union information outlet by making employers inform employees all about the union options they have.
- The NLRB wants to change rules to force “card check” on workers, a rule that will take away their right to a secret ballot while voting for or against unions. This is the very law that Congress rejected because voters are against it. So, since Obama didn’t get his way through legitimate legislation, he’s doing it through his powers to make rules by fiat.
- Changed rules to shorten the election time that unions have so business has less time to mount a defense against unions.
- Just last month the NLRB announced that it intended to sue any state that passed state legislation guaranteeing that workers can have a secret ballot election. So intent is Obama on taking away worker’s rights to a private vote in union elections that he’d even sue whole states to prevent them from guaranteeing the ages-old democratic right.
- The NLRB even wants to make a new rule that would have girl scouts and kid’s sports teams thrown out of businesses all across the country. Obama is demanding that if businesses allow girl scouts to sell cookies on their property, then they will also have to allow unions to flood their business to solicit for members.
When I said above that these are just a few of the Big Labor approved rules changes that Obama’s NLRB have changed or are in the process of changing, I mean that. There are dozens like this all aimed at hurting business and giving paybacks, sweetheart deals, and extra help to Big Labor.
Of course, now Obama and his comrades on the board want to wildly increase the budget of the NLRB. Obama seeks an increase of $71.2 million over the NLRB’s 2001 levels of funding. And yet, the agency has seen a steep drop in its caseload because unions have fallen to less than 7% of the private-sector workforce. Even as Obama wants a 33% increase in NLRB funding the agency has seen a 45% drop in its case load because of falling union numbers.
So why are we spending millions more for an agency that has less on its plate every year? Only so that Obama’s NLRB can have the funding to turn activist in order to increase union membership and create more rules and regulations that could hamper business.
Obama specializes in ladling on the sort of soothing rhetoric that makes it seem as if he desires a tack to the center. He’s the “reasonable” guy. But his actions never, ever reveal the “reasonable.” They always reveal a hard left ideologue that stands ready to use his power to regulate to hurt business and help unions.
Republicans are not powerless here, though. Last week Georgia Congressman Tom Price showed us how we might put a dent in the anti-business plans of Obama’s jobs-crushing NLRB by adding an amendment to the current budget negotiations that would totally defund the NLRB for the rest of 2011.
Price hopes to take away the resources that the NLRB hopes to put to its anti-business climate. His amendment reads, “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the salaries and expenses of personnel to carry out and implement the National Labor Relations Act.”
Price needs to be supported in this amendment and many more of its type needs to be (and are being) added to the continuing resolution budget process.
The left has specialized in sending forth blizzards of such changes, amendments and regulatory alterations, so many that it is impossible to stop them all. The GOP should emulate that in these budget cut proposals.
In the end, we all know that the government is spent out. But something as badly misused by Obama as the NLRB is a perfect target for savings.