Here’s an update on National Right to Work’s ongoing effort to hold Big Labor-affiliated Obama appointees accountable.
Following the initial round of filings, National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys have now filed supplements to their motions asking National Labor Relations Board Member Craig Becker to recuse himself from pending cases. In addition to the former SEIU and AFL-CIO union lawyer’s clear bias and hostility toward the Foundation, Becker’s signed Ethics Pledge should preclude his participation in cases in which he and his clients had direct involvement. The relevant portion of the Ethics Pledge:
I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.
In one of the cases in which Becker should recuse himself, SEIU affiliate Service Workers United have asked the NLRB to overturn the landmark 2007 decisions Dana Corp. Won by Foundation attorneys, Dana held that workers have 45 days to demand a secret ballot election to toss out an unwanted union after the union achieved monopoly bargaining status through the intimidating card check process.
But Becker actually submitted a legal brief to the Board on behalf of the AFL-CIO and UAW in that very case. It would be highly unethical for Becker to rule on the validity of a prior Board case in which he served as counsel.
While his controversial nomination was stalled in the Senate, Becker also promised to recuse himself from cases involving his former employer, the radical SEIU union. The real test of his ethics, however, comes with cases involving SEIU affiliates and locals.
As Foundation attorney Glenn Taubman explains in one of the motion supplements, in the 2009 Supreme Court case Locke v. Karass the SEIU International (Becker’s former employer until the very day of his recess appointment) admitted to operating "a ‘pooling’ scheme to fund, and thereby control, the litigation of all of its local unions."
In the present case, Foundation attorneys have asked the NLRB to review a case involving SEIU Local 121RN union officials’ threats to nurses of financial penalties and even arrest for refusing to abandon their patients during a union-ordered strike.
Will Becker adhere to the plain language of the ethics pledge and recuse himself from these cases which are substantially related to his former employment? Unfortunately, the precedent in the Obama Administration isn’t encouraging.
