Major business coalitions urging National Labor Relations Board to preserve secret ballots

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/major-business-coalitions-urging-national-labor-relations-board-to-preserve-secret-ballots-instead-of-card-check-for-union-elections-106457818.html

By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
11/01/10 1:50 PM EDT

Currently, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is considering a case that could seriously undermine the right to secret ballots in union elections, as opposed to the “card check” method of counting worker support for unionization that unions have been agitating for. In respsonse, the business community has released a brief today signed by 225 national and regional business associations representing thousands of businesses urging the NLRB to preserve secret ballots in union elections.

Before the NLRB at the moment is a case involving the Lamons Gasket Company, which many see as crucial to ensuring that unions are not allowed force workers to publicly declare their whether they want to form a union, a move that would allow union organizers to target and pressure workers who don’t support unionization. That this case is coming before the NLRB is worrying for the business community, as Obama’s recess-appointed Craig Becker to the NLRB after he was rejected by the Senate.

Becker, a former lawyer for AFL-CIO and SEIU, was widely suspected of wanting to engineer a back door strategy to implement “card check” legislation through the NLRB, since the legislation has failed to move in the Senate. Becker has already been investigated for conflicts of interest following his failure to recuse himself from cases before the NLRB involving the his former legal clients at the SEIU. Private sector unions, which have been steadily shrinking in membership, are desperate for card check powers to force new businesses into their foundering multiemployer pension plans.

FULL story at link.