Today, President Barack Obama issued two deeply disturbing executive orders as his first big payback to Big Labor.

Flanked by union bosses at a White House ceremony, Obama said “Welcome back to the White House” and announced sweeping measures which give his Secretary of Labor the power to blackball non-union contractors targeted by union organizers.

With federal outlays rising dramatically as part of attempts to “stimulate” the economy, the number of firms with federal contracts are expected to increase dramatically in the coming months. Nearly 93 percent of America's private-sector workforce has not chosen to unionize, so union officials hope to leverage these federal funds in a full court press to corral millions more workers into forced-dues-paying union ranks.

One of the Obama executive orders hands his Secretary of Labor virtually unchecked power to blacklist those firms which union officials complain are supposedly violating federal labor laws. The Secretary of Labor is expected to leverage DOL's new powers against companies not agreeing to grease the rails for coercive union organizing drives or companies not ceding to uneconomic or abusive union-boss demands.

This new blacklisting power has enormous implications for the expenditure of taxpayer dollars, to say nothing of individual employee rights.

The other federal executive order effectively bars contractors from sharing truthful, non-coercive information with their employees about the downsides of unionization.

Taken together, the two executive orders go well beyond actions by President Clinton to force employees of federal contractors into union collectives, and they could turn the U.S. Department of Labor into a giant, taxpayer-funded extension of the union organizing wing at AFL-CIO headquarters.

Meanwhile, Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis continues to stonewall important questions about freedom in the workplace.

For more about today's executive orders, read the National Right to Work Foundation's press release.