Foundation Op-Ed: ‘Biden’s Labor Board Wants to Trap Workers in Unions they Oppose’
In an op-ed for The Hill published on Labor Day (September 5, 2023) entitled “Biden’s labor board wants to trap workers in unions they oppose,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix highlighted the coercive pro-union boss policies being pushed by Biden-majority National Labor Relations Board to the detriment of the rights of independent-minded workers:
Big Labor bosses have a problem: Despite their vitriolic rhetoric and a small number of loud online activists, most workers want nothing to do with unions.
A Gallup poll released last Labor Day spotlighted the issue: A strong majority of nonunion workers in the U.S. (58 percent) say they are “not interested at all” in joining a union, whereas just 11 percent say they are “extremely interested.”
Since it takes a majority of workers in a given workplace to support a union before monopoly union representation can be imposed, union organizers face a basic math problem — one that explains why only 6 percent of private-sector workers are unionized today.
Yet rather than consider ways of making unionization more attractive to rank-and-file workers, politically-connected union bosses have a different plan: Rig the rules to force more workers into their ranks, willing or not.
President Biden, who campaigned on being “the most pro-union president in American history” and is counting on Big Labor’s multi-billion-dollar political machine again in 2024, is unleashing his administration to the benefit of his favorite special interest.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), stocked with Biden appointees and former union lawyers, has been busy doing just that. If workers won’t voluntarily vote unions in, Biden’s NLRB, whose rules cover most private sector workers, wants to take their vote away.
That’s why the NLRB, at the end of August, effectively mandated the “card check” unionization process by bureaucratic fiat. Never mind that numerous union-backed measures in Congress to require this abuse-prone unionization process have failed to pass into law.
Card-check drives occur when employers, usually in the face of union-applied political and economic pressure, waive workers’ right to a secret ballot election. During these drives, union officials are allowed to demand union authorization cards directly from workers using coercive tactics that would be unlawful during a secret ballot vote.
Union organizers can show up at workers’ homes over and over again demanding signatures, in some instances requiring workers to call the police to get organizers to leave. Workers report being misled about the true implications of signing the cards, and some have been told they would be fired if they didn’t sign just before the union successfully took over.
Some workers even face threats of violence. In one SEIU organizing drive, a worker reported being told that the union would “come and get her children” and “slash her tires” if she didn’t sign a union card…
Read the rest of Mark’s piece on the website of The Hill here.
National Right to Work Foundation In the Wall Street Journal: “Trapped by the Teamsters”
Recently the Wall Street Journal published a piece by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation President Mark Mix titled “Trapped by the Teamsters.”
The op-ed describes the numerous NLRB policies, doctrines and “bars” workers across the country face when merely attempting to hold a vote to oust Teamsters bosses and other union officials as their monopoly bargaining so-called “representative.” The article illustrates these coercive policies through recent examples faced by workers who have turned to the Foundation for free legal aid:
A majority of workers at a Wisconsin trucking company experienced this over the past two years. First, they were blocked from removing their union by the so-called voluntary-recognition bar. This stops workers from decertifying a union for up to a year after the union is installed through “card check”—a procedure that avoids the need for a secret ballot and makes workers vulnerable to union intimidation.
Then, after waiting a year for that bar to expire, the Wisconsin workers found they had been merged by Teamsters officials into a multicompany nationwide bargaining unit of about 24,000 workers. Suddenly the petition to oust the local union was 7,000 signatures short—for a workplace with fewer than 10 union workers. Last month the NLRB declined the Wisconsin workers’ appeal, though a majority of voting board members signaled they would revisit the “merger doctrine” policy in the future.
Other workers face other hurdles: The “settlement bar” blocks a decertification vote because of an NLRB settlement to which the workers weren’t a party; the “successor bar” blocks a vote for up to a year after a company is acquired; the “contract bar” blocks a vote for up to three years after a union contract is forged; and a “blocking charge” blocks a vote while union allegations against a company are pending. None of these are required by law.
The NLRB is addressing the voluntary-recognition bar and blocking charges through the current rule-making process, but the other policies are similarly destructive of workers’ legal right to vote out a union that lacks majority backing. Congress should act to protect workers from being trapped in union ranks they oppose, but in the meantime the NLRB has the authority to eliminate these barriers.
Union officials unable to win the support of a majority of the workers they purport to represent shouldn’t maintain power solely because of bureaucratic rules. Instead, whenever enough workers file a petition to remove a union they oppose, the NLRB should simply let them vote.
Read the whole piece here.
Labor Day Media Round Up: National Right to Work Commentaries Highlight Injustices of Forced Unionism
On Labor Day, the National Right to Work Foundation generated significant coverage in both national and local media outlets, especially on newspaper opinion pages. Foundation President Mark Mix wrote a number of pieces for outlets around the country highlighting the injustices of compulsory unionism and what can be done to protect workers freedom.
Mix wrote for USA Today that no American should be forced to pay union dues just to get or keep a job and highlighted the prevalence of compulsory unionism despite Right to Work laws gaining ground:
Twenty-seven states have now enacted and implemented right-to-work laws, with five joining in the last eight years.
And on June 27 of last year, the U.S Supreme Court handed down one of the most significant employee rights legal victories in the history of the right-to-work movement with the Janus decision, which ended the forced payment of union dues or fees for millions of government workers nationwide.
Unfortunately, there are more private sector American workers in the 23 non-right-to-work states and others in the railway and airline industries who still work under compulsory unionism.
Mix also wrote a column for the Detroit News arguing that no worker should ever have to fear union violence just because they disagree with union tactics or thuggish strong-arming:
Violence, the threat of violence and the wrongful non-violent use of fear and intimidation by union thugs should be illegal. No exceptions.
The spreading UAW corruption scandal shows that union bosses often act as though they are above the law.
For the Lexington Herald-Leader, Mix wrote about how Kentucky’s Right to Work law benefits the state, and why they need to protect it from the attacks of Democrat and gubernatorial candidate Attorney General Andy Beshear, who wants to give power back to union bosses should he be elected to replace Governor Matt Bevin a friend of Right to Work:
Beshear wants to return the Commonwealth of Kentucky to the days of workers being forced to hand over a portion of their hard-earned paychecks to the union boss elites to get or keep a job. Meanwhile, the Bevin Administration has spearheaded record economic growth after passing Right to Work here in Kentucky.
Even putting that enormous economic growth aside, the fact is that one candidate favors allowing Big Labor to extract money from workers’ paychecks, and the other candidate has worked tirelessly to protect Kentucky workers’ right to hold onto their paychecks without union boss interference.
And for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Mark wrote how Right to Work laws have benefitted Nevada’s workers and families for more than half a century, causing noticeable effects for the state’s economy:
There is a reason Tesla’s Gigafactory is located in Nevada and not California. A nationwide 2017 survey of business leaders conducted by Chief Executive magazine found that, by a 2-to-1 margin, CEOs prefer adding jobs in right-to-work states over other states.
Business owners correctly view states that have passed right-to-work laws as being more welcoming and business-friendly than high-tax, forced-dues states such as California. That is why federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that from 2013-18, factory employment growth in Nevada was more than three times greater than in Western forced-union states such as Colorado, Oregon and Montana.
Just a few days after Labor Day, the Daily Caller published a timely op-ed from Mix regarding the Trump Administration’s rules to make it harder for union officials, like those implicated in the unfolding UAW scandal, to spend worker’s money on themselves or fuel their corruption:
At the end of May, the Trump Labor Department unveiled a rule that, as a contemporaneous news account filed by the Law360 legal news service explained, imposes “financial disclosure requirements for certain trusts that unions set up, scrutiny the agency says will ‘deter fraud and corruption.”
The proposed rule would reestablish the Form T-1, which until it was scuttled by union-label Obama administration bureaucrats in 2010 blocked officers of unions with $250,000 or more in annual revenue from using trusts supposedly created to benefit rank-and-file members to circumvent the federal reporting requirements for such unions that Congress instituted in the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.
In addition, Mix wrote two op-eds, one for Right to Work states and the other for non-Right to Work states, which were sent out across the country and printed in local newspapers. They highlight the benefits of Right to Work laws and the problems that forced unionism causes.
