Thread: New labor move is anti-biz, jobs

In another job, with another employer, at another time many years ago, I was a union activist. I edited a union newspaper, recruited new members and promoted the union whenever I could. Then I became its grievance chairman.

For 2½ years I spent 95 percent of my union-work time defending the incompetents, the lazy, the malingers and the malcontents. And they got paid the same as my fellow workers who showed up every day and gave their all to the job. What’s more, I saw how union rules frustrated management innovations to improve our journalistic product.

A few years later I moved on to another journalistic enterprise without a union. I saw merit pay raises given to the hard workers, no salary hikes to those who didn’t or couldn’t do the job, and eventual dismissal of anyone who couldn’t measure up to the demands of the magazine. Thus began my journey from liberal to conservative.

That’s not the story you’d expect to hear as we approach the day designated to celebrate the labor movement. And labor does have a great history of men and women risking their jobs and their lives to redress deplorable working conditions, capricious and arbitrary pay scales, and exploitative employers.

For the most part, that belongs to another era. A legacy of past union victories and the reasonable government work rules they inspired is that today’s bosses generally understand that fair pay and working conditions make for better employees, more productivity and a superior bottom line. This change in attitude is part of the reason — though not the only one — that the percentage of private sector employees in unions fell to 6.9 percent last year, the lowest in more than a century, according to the New York Times.

I don’t say there are no places where unions wouldn’t be good. But if deplorable working conditions and exploitative bosses were common, unions would have no trouble finding brave men and women to advance the union cause. That’s not the case. Workers see how unions have undermined the competitiveness of industries — think of the once Big Three automakers — and eroded long-term job security.

So, to reverse the decline in union fortunes, the labor movement has turned to its Democratic friends in government to put a thumb on the scales to tip the balance against employers. Labor’s chief goal coming out of the 2008 election was a “card check” proposal to eliminate the secret ballot in union certification votes. It was a bridge too far even though Democrats had overwhelming majorities in Congress because conservative Democrats couldn’t swallow such an anti-democratic and anti-business measure. It would have opened the way for union thugs to muscle employees to sign union cards to win certification.

In the custom of the Obama administration turning to regulation to achieve what it can’t get through Congress, the National Labor Relations Board picked up the ball. It speeded up union representation election procedures to deny employers time to make their case and employees time to learn about all the implications of unionization. The NLRB ordered that employers must post notices — with the agency’s bureaucrats dictating the poster’s dimensions, color and type size — about the right to unionize. Another NLRB ruling allows unions to cherry pick employees in nursing homes to participate in union representation elections in order to improve the chances of a yes vote.

The most notorious NLRB pro-union action is its effort to prevent Boeing from building a new jetliner-construction plant in South Carolina, a right-to-work state.

The NLRB is the vanguard of anti-business Democrats in Washington. Their agenda discourages business investment and job creation. It’s a fundamental road block to reducing the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate. This Labor Day would be a happier one if millions more Americans were engaged in productive labor.

Originally Posted by min0 lee

The NLRB is the vanguard of anti-business Democrats in Washington. Their agenda discourages business investment and job creation. It’s a fundamental road block to reducing the nation’s persistently high unemployment rate. This Labor Day would be a happier one if millions more Americans were engaged in productive labor.

I nearly spit out my drink when I read that...

below is the main problem with the new rule changes:

"Overall, the new rules could make it harder for employers to stall elections and easier for unions to organize new members. Right now, elections typically take place within two months of organizers having gathered a sufficient number of signatures from workers -- a generous amount of time, organizers argue, that employers can use to pressure workers not to unionize. The NLRB’s new rules would certainly shorten that period, though it’s hard to say by how much."

here is the "no-spin" version...

Proposed amendments to NLRB election rules and regulations fact sheet | NLRB

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_881057.html