Nat'l Labor Relations Bd NLRB

includes other govt agy

TARGET

IG FIRED WWW?

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PUBLIC CIT BALLROOM

no lnx

Donor Corporate Sector Federal Enforcement Faced

Apple Big Tech DOJ litigation alleging antitrust violations to monopolize the

smartphone market.

NLRB cases alleging unfair labor practices.

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AN 10 25

“Waste, fraud, and abuse.”

It’s President Donald Trump’s battle cry as he dismantles federal agencies, fires hundreds of thousands of employees, and demoralizes the workers who remain. It’s also another of his false flag operations.

Rather than ferreting out corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the federal government, Trump has undermined the very professionals who have that job: inspectors general.

The Role of the IGs

In the wake of procurement scandals and President Richard Nixon’s corrupt abuse of executive power for personal ends, Congress passed the Inspector General Act of 1978 to establish formally the duties and responsibilities of the office. Inspectors general pursue their missions with nonpartisan objectives and have a central role in holding government accountable.

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Approximately half of the 70-plus inspectors general are appointed by the president, subject to Senate confirmation. They are the only independent offices within federal agencies designed to protect taxpayer money and root out corruption, fraud, waste, and mismanagement. IGs also investigate whistleblowers’ confidential claims.

Over the almost 50 years of their statutory existence, they have saved taxpayers billions of dollars.

Trump’s Escalating War on Independent IGs

For Trump and his allies, independent inspectors general have been a nuisance and worse. Following acquittal in his first impeachment, he replaced IGs for the intelligence community, State Department, Defense Department, Health and Human Services, and Transportation Department.

In his second term, Trump has moved more broadly and more rapidly. Typically, IGs remained in place when new presidents took office, underscoring their nonpartisan roles. But in violation of the statutory 30-day notice and “for cause” requirements for termination, Trump fired 17 of them during the first week of his second term. He had appointed several of them during his first term.

So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.

During post-termination interviews with the New York Times, the fired IGs said that their biggest concern was the “chilling effect” that their abrupt, unlawful, and unjustified terminations would have on others. Professor Timothy Snyder calls it “obeying in advance.” The inspectors general used similar language to describe their fears:

“Self-censorship”

“Why would you want to write a report that will get you fired?”

“Installing someone who has more loyalty to one person than to the mission of the office.”

“If you do the work that you’re intended to do and it’s not popular, then you will be punished.”

“Who will speak truth to power?”

The concerns were justified. Trump doesn’t want anyone speaking truth to his power.

On Tuesday, February 11, the inspector general for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Paul Martin, issued a report criticizing Trump’s proposed dismantling of that agency and outlining the disastrous consequences. The next day, Trump fired him.

Final Act of Destruction

On September 28, 2025, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced that effective October 1 it was defunding the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. It was a strategic kill shot because the council is the umbrella agency supporting all of the inspectors general offices.

Beginning on October 1, what had been the website for the council stated only:

Due to a lack of apportionment of funds, this website is currently unavailable.

The same line appeared at numerous Office of Inspector General websites, including the Departments of Agriculture, Education, Justice, Interior and Veterans Affairs, and by those of AmeriCorps, Export-Import Bank of the United States, Federal Trade Commission, International Trade Commission, National Archives and Records Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Personnel Management, Smithsonian Institution, and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

Contacting the watchdog website for the National Labor Relations Board’s OIG page resulted in a “404 error.” The Architect of the Capitol’s IG page said “Not found”; another new page offered only hotline information and blamed the change on a “funding issue impacting Oversight.gov functions.”

The council also runs Oversight.gov, which houses over 34,000 reports from most of the OIGs, and operates 28 OIG websites that host legally required hotlines for whistleblowers to report suspected cases of government corruption, waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. That site was down too. The council site’s link to the “Inspectors General directory” stated only: “Not Found—the requested URL was not found on this server.”

Not a Funding Issue

But the so-called “lack of funds” asserted on the inoperative council website was not the result of the simultaneous government shutdown. The council’s budget did not require additional congressional authorization.

Rather, the OMB under the leadership of Director Russell Vought decided not to fund it. Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist, was a primary architect of Project 2025—a 900-page blueprint for expanding executive power (“the unitary executive”) and imposing an ultraconservative social vision. During the 2024 campaign, Project 2025 was so toxic that Trump repeatedly disavowed and claimed to know nothing about it; as president, he’s boasting about working with Vought to implement it.

Asked about its defunding decision, the OMB asserted without evidence that it shut down the IGs because they had “become corrupt, partisan, and in some cases, have lied to the public.”

Republicans Are Concerned?!

Even Senate Republicans were outraged. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House to release the funding immediately.

So far, it hasn’t.

So the next time Trump and his allies say they’re eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the federal government, remember that Trump is actually doing the opposite: clearing away key guardrails of accountability.

And remember that when Republicans in Congress say they are “outraged” at some action Trump has taken, don’t expect them to do anything about it.

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an truthdig 6 25

In an unsigned two-page decision (*Trump v. Wilcox*) released on May 22, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s move to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without cause and in the middle of their designated terms. The decision reversed two separate judgments issued by two different D.C. District Court judges that had blocked the firings as unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court’s ruling was issued on an expedited basis as part of a rapidly expanding and highly controversial set of truncated decisions known as the “shadow docket,” a term coined by University of Chicago professor William Baude in a 2015 law review article to describe emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and that are typically resolved without complete briefing, oral arguments or detailed opinions. Although shadow-docket rulings are frequently used to lift, or “stay,” lower-court injunctions while further litigation continues, they often have the same practical effect as final decisions.

The two officials involved in the Wilcox case, Gwynne Wilcox of the NLRB and Cathy Harris of the MSPB, were nominated to their positions by President Joe Biden and were confirmed by the Senate. Before their dismissals, they were set to serve fixed terms, with Wilcox’s tenure expiring in 2028 and Harris’ in 2029.

The NLRB’s five-member governing board is charged with enforcing U.S. labor law and collective bargaining, and adjudicating alleged unfair labor practices. The MSPB has a three-member board and adjudicates federal employee challenges to adverse employment actions. Both agencies were established by Congress to operate as independent, nonpartisan overseers free from presidential interference.

Donald Trump has long railed against agency independence. In a 2019 speech at Turning Point USA’s Teen Action Summit, he declared, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” referring to the second article of the Constitution and the “unitary executive” theory, which contends that all executive power is concentrated in the president. Trump is also a proponent of the goal of “deconstructing the administrative state,” a phrase popularized by Steve Bannon and more recently promoted by Project 2025.

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Donald Trump has long railed against agency independence.

Sensing an opportunity to strike, Trump fired Wilcox, a career labor attorney, on Jan. 27, a week after his second inauguration. Harris was sent packing a month later. The lower-court orders mandating their reinstatements were issued in March. But on April 9, Trump’s solicitor general and former criminal defense attorney D. John Sauer requested the Supreme Court to intervene and put the district-court judgments on hold, allowing the dismissals to take effect while returning the cases to the district courts and the Court of Appeals for additional hearings, a process that could easily take more than a year.

In his petition to the Supreme Court, Sauer implored the justices to disregard the court’s 1935 precedent decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that Congress has the constitutional power to enact laws limiting the president’s authority to fire executive officers of independent agencies that exercise quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions. Sauer asked the justices to put the lower-court reinstatement orders on hold or, alternatively, issue a final decision on the merits, endorsing the administration’s actions.

Although the firings of Wilcox and Harris clearly ran afoul of Humphrey’s, the Supreme Court granted a stay, and both women were sacked. Just as shocking, the court did so without hearing oral arguments, and without citing Humphrey’s a single time in its decision.

The three Democratic-appointees on the court dissented. Writing for herself and justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan blasted her Republican colleagues for their bad faith and bias in favor of the president. “For 90 years,” she charged, “Humphrey’s Executor v. United States … has stood as a precedent of this Court. And not just any precedent. Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control.”

Quoting Alexander Hamilton, she continued, “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents.” Without mentioning the shadow docket by name, she castigated the majority for rushing to judgment, “unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument — and the passage of time — needed to discipline our decision-making.”

Although the Supreme Court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals — such as last-minute requests for stays of execution in death penalty cases — emergency requests in high-profile cases proliferated during Trump’s first term, earning the shadow-docket sobriquet. According to Georgetown University law professor and shadow-docket scholar Steve Vladeck, the first Trump administration sought emergency relief 41 times, with the Supreme Court granting relief in 28 of those cases. By comparison, the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations filed a combined total of eight emergency relief requests over a 16-year period.

In December 2017, the Supreme Court issued a shadow-docket ruling allowing the third and final version of Trump’s racist Muslim travel ban to move forward pending further appeals. The court ultimately approved the ban in a 2018 merits decision. Later in Trump’s first go-round, the court used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s executive actions calling for the diversion of federal funds to construct the southern border wall, prohibiting transgender people from openly serving in the military and restricting the ability of Central American refugees to seek political asylum.

During Biden’s presidency, the shadow docket shifted to emergency requests filed by red state governments and private parties, but the court maintained its rightward bias. Among other shadow-docket decisions, the court ended Biden’s COVID-19 eviction moratorium; permitted the new six-week Texas abortion ban to take effect (it would later approve the ban in a final decision that overturned *Roe v. Wade*); and reinstated a first-Trump-term policy that made it easier for companies to pursue projects that pollute U.S. waters.

“What we are seeing are the consequences of a deeply conservative court.”

Kagan is not alone in her critique that the shadow docket undermines precedent and lacks transparency. At times the criticism has become heated. In September 2021, Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer triggered an open feud with Justice Samuel Alito, penning a column that accused the court’s right-wing majority of publishing its ruling on Texas’ abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In response, Alito excoriated the media during an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at Notre Dame University for portraying the court’s majority as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”

Fortunately, not every shadow-docket order has leaned in the direction of Trump and the MAGA movement. One notable exception was the court’s May 16 ruling that extended an earlier ban on the deportation of undocumented Venezuelan men in immigration custody in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. But even that decision ended with a note of encouragement for Trump, advising that “The Government may remove the [men] … under other lawful authorities.” There was also an impassioned 14-page dissent written by Alito and joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

On May 30, the court issued another pro-Trump shadow-docket order, allowing the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela that had been granted by the Biden administration. And in the coming weeks and months, the court can be expected to return to the shadow docket again in cases involving the deportation of undocumented migrants to South Sudan, the operations of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and possibly the legality of Trump’s tariffs.

Given the court’s overall jurisprudence, there is scant reason to be optimistic that it will openly repudiate or substantially limit the president’s authority in these or other cases critical to the nation’s future. As Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, told Reuters in a 2021 interview, “What we are seeing are the consequences of a deeply conservative court, with the added travesties of the shadow docket.”

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COULD HAVE HAD A MAJORTY?!

TMP 12 24

Schumer torpedoed by Manchin and Sinema on crucial NLRB vote

11 24 ymail patr mill

the Senate must reconfirm National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran before her term expires on December 16th.

Ms. McFerran has served admirably on the NLRB since 2014 and has the backing of the AFL-CIO and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.^2,3

Since her tenure on the NLRB began, she has fought to ban “captive audience” meetings and for workers’ rights to unionize. If reconfirmed, she will serve another five year term, which means she’ll stay on the board during the entirety of Donald Trump’s second term.

Donald Trump has won the White House and the ultra-wealthy oligarchs who paid to put him there want their money’s worth.They will do anything to crush workers' organizing, reduce pay and benefits, and sacrifice worker safety if that means being able to increase their profits.

Project 2025 lays out a blueprint for the incoming Trump administration to follow as it pertains to labor unions: make it easier to decertify union elections, reduce the NLRB’s ability to investigate unfair labor practices, and reduce overtime pay.⁴ In the end, the only beneficiaries of these policies will be multi-billion dollar corporations and the ultra-wealthy who run and own them.

If Lauren McFerran is not reconfirmed before Congress breaks for recess, Donald Trump will gain control of two board seats, shifting the balance to a conservative majority who will allow Project 2025’s anti-labor proposals to go into full effect.

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an 8 24

'Lasting political consequences' as UAW files labor charges against Trump, Musk over X interview

an 4 24

...

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking about is allowing adolescents to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an “interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry plant in Mississippi, where he died in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for everyone, not to hire children to do it.

We’re Gonna Roll the Union Over

Mind you, much to the displeasure of Project 2025 types, this country is experiencing a renaissance of union organizing. Companies that long thought they could avoid unionization, from Amazon to Starbucks, are now the subject of such drives. In my own world of higher education, new unions are popping up and established ones are demonstrating renewed vigor in both private and public universities. As the bumper-sticker puts it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.” They’re the reason we have laws on wages and hours, not to speak of on-the-job protections. So, it should be no surprise that Project 2025 wants to reduce the power of unions in a number of ways, including:

• Amending the National Labor Relations Act to allow “Employee Involvement Organizations” to supplant unions. Such “worker-management councils” are presently forbidden for good reason. They replace real unions that have the power to bargain for wages and working conditions with toothless pseudo-unions.

• Ending the use of “card-checks” and requiring elections to certify union representation. At the moment, the law still permits a union to present signed union-support cards from employees to the National Labor Relations Board and the employer. If both entities agree, the union wins legal recognition. The proposed change would make it significantly harder for unions to get certified, especially because cards can be collected without the employer’s knowledge, whereas a public election with a long lead time gives the employer ample scope for anti-union organizing activities, both legal and otherwise.

• Allowing individual states to opt out of labor protections granted under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act.

The measures covered here are, believe it or not, just the highlights of that labor chapter of Project 2025. If put into practice, they would be an historically unprecedented dream come true for employers, and a genuine nightmare for working people.

Meanwhile, at the Trumpified and right-wing-dominated Supreme Court, there are signs that some justices are interested in entertaining a case brought by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that could abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal entity that adjudicates most labor disputes involving federal law. Without the NLRB, legal protections for workers, especially organizing or organized workers, would lose most of their bite. Despite the court’s claim to pay no attention to public opinion, its justices would certainly take note of a resounding defeat of Donald Trump, the Republicans, and Project 2025 at the polls.

A New “Contract on America?”

The last time the right wing was this organized was probably back in 1994, when Newt Gingrich published his “Contract with America.” Some of us were so appalled by its contents that we referred to it as a plan for a gangster hit, a “Contract onAmerica.”

This year, they’re back with a vengeance. All of which is to say that if you work for a living, or if you know and love people who do, there’s a lot on the line in this year’s election. We can’t sit this one out.

REBECCA GORDON

That wasn't the only comment offered to Salon from TPUSA. Troy Meeker, the group's administrative director of human capital, sent a statement reading, "Turning Point USA has both vaccinated and unvaccinated employees and the organization does not ask status. TPUSA is in full compliance with both federal and state laws."

It isn't exactly new for right-wing media-oriented entities to violate the rights of their own workers. Most notably, in June of 2019, Federalist co-founder Ben Domenech threatened via Twitter to send his staff members back to "the salt mine" if they attempted to unionize, which would later be deemed unlawful by the National Labor Relations Board.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/nlrb/

peter robb fired

an 1120

The core of the Republican Party strength is concentrated in the 27 Right to Work states.As discussed in a previous article, Right to Work laws are designed to weaken unions by cutting their revenue and membership. Unions represent just 7.5% of the workforce in right to work states but almost 16% in "fair share" states. The 27 "right to work" states account for 83% of the currently seated Republican Senators and 70% of their Representatives. In 2016, Trump carried 25 of the 27 these states.

JUDICIAL BRANCH – Anti-Union/Pro Business Judges Dominate the Supreme Court and Appellate Courts

The Republican Party has worked for a long time to ensure that the federal court system is dominated by conservative, pro-business/anti-union judges over the long term. Indeed, Republicans basically packed the court system when Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused to allow the Senate to vote on 105 judicial vacancies during the Obama administration which were later filled by Trump appointees.

Supreme Court. The Supreme Court now has 6 Republican appointed justices and 3 Democratic Justices. Each of the three Trump appointees had a proven anti-union/pro-corporate bias before being nominated.

Amy Coney Barrett. During her term on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Barrett ruled in favor of corporate interest more than 75% of the time. She ruled that corporations are entitled to set job requirements that exclude older workers and that they may segregate workers at different locations by race. She has also expressed support for striking the entire Affordable Care Act which would deprive health insurance for 20 million people and end protections for 100 million people with pre-existing conditions.

Neil Gorsuch. During his term on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gorsuch repeatedly ruled against workers and in favor of corporations. For example, Gorsuch dissented from a majority ruling upholding a National Labor Relations Board decision that an employer must give full back pay to workers it illegally fired for union activity. Gorsuch dissented in cases in which the circuit court majority supported pro-worker NLRB decisions stating that the NLRB exceeded the scope of its authority. However, Gorsuch made no such dissent when the court ruled in favor of NLRB decisions that supported management.

Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh served on the extremely important US District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This court is second only to the Supreme Court in terms of prestige and power because it has jurisdiction over Congress and most federal regulations and agencies. The People for the American Way compiled a list of rulings showing that Kavanaugh consistently ruled against workers and for corporations during his 12½ years on the DC Circuit Court. Examples include Kavanaugh's opinions that would "entirely eviscerate collective bargaining;" his support for corporations seeking criminal citations for lawful union protests; and support for corporations that failed to protect workers health and safety.

Other Federal Courts. In almost 4 years Trump and the Republican Senate have appointed 24% of all active federal judges (194 of 792). There are 35 more nominations currently pending. Trump has appointed 30% of all active federal appeals court judges (54 of 179). This is more than any other president over the last 40 years. Overall, Republican appointees now account for 54% of all federal circuit court judges. The circuit courts are especially powerful because they function as final arbiter for the vast majority of cases since the Supreme Court accepts fewer than 2% of the 7-8,000 cases filed with it annually. These courts ultimately determine what the federal government can and cannot regulate – this is especially important to unions in relation to the right to organize and collectively bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions as well as the relative power of unions and corporations....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-federal-agency-for-protecting-workers-is-targeting-unions-and-weakening-labor-rights

when Dan Hoskins tried to organize colleagues at an Oregon plant in 2019, vindictive managers marched him past as many workers as possible en route to a disciplinary meeting in the human resources office.

The company wanted to create a climate of fear, Hoskins recalled, not only by threatening his job but ensuring others saw “Mr. Leader Pants getting written up.”

From trumped-up disciplinary charges to threats of layoffs and other scare tactics, corporations wage ferocious wars of intimidation to sabotage organizing campaigns and torment union supporters.

“You’re in a war zone,” explained Hoskins, who willingly shouldered the mistreatment because he understands the benefits unions bring to a workplace. “The tension is thick, and you know it’s going to be that way for months."

sadly, abused workers can expect no help from the Trump administration, which is busy trying to exterminate labor unions.

Even as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the urgent need for stronger workplace protections, Trump’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ramped up a scorched-earth campaign aimed at annihilating organized labor and subjugating American workers.

The string of NLRB rulings amounts to death by a thousand cuts, each one chipping away at the long-established rights and practices enabling working people to join together to build better lives.

For example, theNLRB—run by Trump’s handpicked corporate cronies—imposed additional, unnecessary steps to the union election procedure solely to drag out the process and give employers more time to thwart organizing efforts.

And the agency went further, empowering employers to begin withholding email addresses and other information unions need merely to contact prospective voters.

The board also ruled that employers may discipline a worker just for mentioning a union drive to a colleague during work hours. In a decision rooted in spite, rather than logic, it concluded the mere reference to an organizing effort—even an offhand remark—constituted an illegal solicitation of a colleague’s vote.

The NLRB is ostensibly responsible for protecting workers’ rights. But under Trump, it’s stacking the deck in favor of greedy corporations desperate to silence workers’ voices and bust unions at any cost.

Hoskins said the several organizing efforts he helped to lead all fell short amid unfair rules that restricted his activities yet gave his employers free rein to viciously bully workers and paper the plant—even the cupboards and tables in the cafeteria—with anti-union propaganda.

He likened the uneven playing field facing unions to a political campaign in which only one candidate gets to use social media or a fight in which one person gets only one punch to an opponent’s 10.

“Then we’re supposed to win the boxing match?” asked Hoskins, who supports unions because they give workers a voice in the workplace and force corporations to share more of their profits with the people who actually create them.

The Trump administration continually seeks new ways to rig the system against working people.

In one of its biggest gifts to corporations yet, the NLRB went to court to overturn an Oregon law that affords workers a degree of protection from the pernicious anti-union meetings that employers across the country regularly hold to belittle union supporters, lie about labor and kill organizing campaigns.

In Oregon, employers may hold anti-union meetings.But they cannot force workers to attend them. The NLRB filed suit to change that, arguing the law violates employers’ free-speech rights.

That’s right. The Trump administration wants to further free employers to lie, bully and fearmonger during organizing drives, even as it empowers the same companies to discipline workers for so much as mentioning a union.

Hoskins attended anti-union meetings over the years where managers falsely claimed that a union could undercut a company’s competitiveness and force it to cut jobs.

“The number one emotion they manipulate is fear,” Hoskins said, noting one panicked co-worker threatened him for leading the union drive.

If the NLRB overturns Oregon’s law, employers will ramp up the coercion and launch anti-union campaigns every bit as brutal as the one Kumho Tire waged against workers in Macon, Georgia, in 2016-2017.

After workers began an organizing drive with the United Steelworkers (USW), Kumho forced them into daily anti-union meetings—each lasting up to 90 minutes—in which the company repeatedly threatened to close the plant, haul away the equipment and eliminate their jobs.

Kumho augmented that torture with shop-floor conversations in which supervisors continually bullied workers and demanded to know how they planned to vote. The pressure tactics began the moment workers began their shifts each day, creating an atmosphere of pure hell inside the plant.

Yet workers are persevering in their efforts to organize—just like a growing number of other Americans.

The NLRB’s assault on organized labor and workers’ rights comes as more workers—at companies ranging from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods to FedEx and multi-billionaire Warren Buffett’s Cort Furniture—seek the protection of unions.

The pandemic further widened America’s rampant income inequality and underscored corporations’ indifference to workplace safety, as workers at Cort Furniture and Orlando International Airport discovered when their bosses herded them into anti-union meetings despite the need for social distancing.

These and other exploited workers realize that only by organizing can they win family-sustaining wages, decent benefits and safe working conditions.

However, building better lives for millions of ordinary Americans will require an NLRB committed to vigorously enforcing labor rights.

The president nominates NLRB members as well as the agency’s powerful general counsel, and the Senate confirms them. So only the election of federal officials committed to workers’ rights can truly put the agency back on course.

Trump and his Senate allies not only installed corporate lawyer Peter Robb as general counsel but put former GOP congressional staffer Marvin Kaplan and corporate lawyers John Ring and William Emanuel on the five-person board—appointments that deliberately set in motion the war on unions and workers.

In a recent letter, the USW urged senators to reject Trump’s renomination of Kaplan, whose term expires in August, because of the unprecedented damage he helped inflict on Americans like Hoskins, who only want fair treatment on the job. The Senate voted to confirm him for another term anyway.

Hoskins first grasped the value of collective bargaining years ago after seeing a corporate executive pocket millions of dollars in a single quarter, while some of his co-workers struggled to make ends meet.

Ever since, he willingly endured managers’ harassment during organizing campaigns because he understands the life-changing differences a union would deliver.

Hoskins doesn’t mind fighting for a union. He only wishes the NLRB would finally give him a fair shot.

Tom Conwayis the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

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NLRB suspends unionizing amid COVID-19 crisis

Terry Schwadron / DC Report

Just as delivery personnel, medical staffers and just about everyone who has to be out in first-responder roles is raising serious questions about lacking proper protections, the federal government has…

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djt

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-seems-to-have-no-problem-undermining-independent-unions/

bd libtard

no lnx

Trump seems to have no problem undermining independent unions

Written by Max Moran / Independent Media Institute October 17, 2019

Anyone praising the Ukraine whistleblowers for their courage, and fearful of the chilling effect of the Trump administration’s crackdown on whistleblowers, ought to support strong and independent public sector unions. Unions, after all, offer federal workers protection from the whims of the political appointees who are often their ultimate bosses.

Yet President Donald Trump recently lifted a man whose whole career has centered on eviscerating public-sector unions to a position with direct power over them, and it was only reported in a single state blog. Last week, Trump appointed Maxford Nelsen to fill a seat on the Federal Service Impasses Panel (FSIP), a board housed within the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA).

Most people have never heard of Nelsen, FSIP, or the FLRA. But if you work for the federal government, this decision could leave you with less job security and more working hours. Since the federal government is the largest employer in the American economy, that’s a lot of people who could suffer due to this decision.

The FLRA is an independent agency which oversees the relationship between federal workers’ unions and their bosses—think of it as a neutral decision-maker when unions and management need an external voice to make the final call on a given issue. Within the FLRA, the FSIP has jurisdiction over two key statutes: one which gave federal workers the right to collective organizing around personnel in the first place, and the other which set rules around schedules and hours for federal workers.

When unions and management can’t reach an agreement over disputes around these two statutes, FSIP ends up having the final word. That’s important, since federal employees don’t have the right to strike, and there are often limitations on what a union can negotiate on within a given agency. An FSIP ruling is meant as an alternative to the usual way labor and management would close an unresolved dispute—namely, with talks breaking down, and the union perhaps going on strike.

As a new member of the FSIP, Nelsen’s vote serves as a substitute to the direct leverage a strike would normally exert, meaning union members’ hopes may end up riding on the decisions of him and his fellow FSIP members. They will almost certainly be disappointed by every ruling he makes.

Since 2013, Nelsen has directed the Freedom Foundation’s labor policy division. The Freedom Foundation is one of the hundreds of generically named conservative think tanks and advocacy groups in the State Policy Network, Charles Koch’s web of libertarian influence organizations. Public-sector unions are a particular bugaboo for the Freedom Foundation, whose CEO once wrote that “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today… The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation.”

That “proven plan” was first developed in 2014, after the Supreme Court ruled that partially-public-sector workers—like home care aides paid through Medicaid—were not required to pay dues to a union they had not joined, even if that union’s negotiations directly benefited them. The Freedom Foundation began public awareness campaigns to urge former dues-payers against contributing. Nelsen’s own work included investigating a South Seattle research center’s financial connections to major unions, and he ultimately called the center “little more than a state-subsidized extension of the WSLC.”

Four years later, the Supreme Court expanded this dues-optional standard to all public-sector unions in the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME ruling. The Freedom Foundation filed an amicus brief for the Janus case which cited a report by Nelsen several times.

Unsurprisingly, Nelsen is a vocal Janus fan, writing blog posts to call out perceived slights from Washington state lawmakers, giddily highlighting dropping union membership, and being ejected from government buildings for handing out leaflets about the decision.

Now, from the board of the FSIP, he’ll have direct authority to make rulings that further weaken government unions’ capacity to credibly stand up to management. And importantly, he’ll be able to do this while still working at the Freedom Foundation to starve these unions of operating revenue. The FSIP is only a part-time commitment, and nothing prevents Nelsen from retaining his research job at the Freedom Foundation. Thus, he can pursue his anti-labor agenda from both the outside and the inside, at the same time, completely legally.

This is not what FSIP was designed for. It’s supposed to be a neutral arbiter between management and labor, not a tool for one side to exert dominance over the other. Which brings us to another key part of the story, namely, that it’s not a new story.

A cursory glance at the member bios shows the current FSIP members include the chair of a legal practice for companies fighting against labor unions, a vice president at the Koch-backed Mercatus Center, a Delta Air Lines lobbyist (the same airline which posted a notorious anti-union poster this year), the founder of a law center “offering free legal services to those hurt by public employee union officials,” a lawyer for the hyper-right-wing Goldwater Institute (named for Barry Goldwater), and a labor policy consultant for the aforementioned Koch vehicle, the State Policy Network.

Every single one of the FSIP’s members comes from a background indicating antagonism to organized labor. FSIP members are appointed for five-year terms, likely to protect against a president stuffing the board with loyalists and ensure some holdovers from administration to administration. But right now, there are no pro-labor members, or even just non-interested parties like academics, to offer any counter-weight to the pro-management bloc.

Nelsen’s appointment, then, is sadly just more of the same. It’s more of the same for FSIP and the FLRA, and more of the same for the Trump administration. Undeniably, there is a lot going on in the news right now, more than almost anyone can follow. But if we let appointments like these and rulings from boards like FSIP slip completely under the radar, the consequences can ripple out and enable the culture of unchecked corruption among appointees that we see today.

Max Moran is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which aims to increase scrutiny on executive branch appointments.

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2017

CEI Leads Coalition Urging Senate to Confirm Marvin Kaplan and William J. Emanuel to the National Labor Relations Board

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July 13, 2017

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RAGA ballotpedia bs

• Arizona won a successful challenge against the National Labor Relations Board which challenged the state’s constitutional amendment guaranteeing worker’s rights to vote by secret ballot on whether to join a union. This case set valuable precedent that will allow these issues to be resolved at the state, not federal, level.

• Republican AGs played a pivotal role in defeating the NLRB's politically motivated attempt to disallow Boeing's business expansion in South Carolina.

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http://thehill.com/regulation/labor/345041-senate-confirms-controversial-trump-pick-to-labor-board

Senate on Wednesday confirmed one of President Trump's nominees to fill one of the vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The Senate in a 50-48 party-line vote approved the nomination of Marvin Kaplan to the board that’s responsible for resolving labor disputes and protecting workers’ collective bargaining rights in the private sector.

Trump's nomination of Kaplan had sparked controversy, with Democrats questioning his knowledge of labor law and whether he would defend workers' rights on the board.

Before a committee vote earlier this month, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) raised concerns about his lack of legal experience before the NLRB. During his confirmation hearing, she said he confused basic labor issues and decisions.

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) criticized Kaplan for the time he spent as a House staffer, where he worked on measures to strip workers of their right to organize and join unions in their workplace.

“After eight months, the Republicans are about to go on vacation, but not before they jam the NLRB with a new anti-worker nominee,” she said.

“The biggest problem in Washington is that this place works great for giant employers and for giant corporations with armies of lawyers and lobbyists, but workers and their families just get ignored.”

Kaplan now serves as chief counsel of the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent federal agency charged with settling contested citations and penalties that businesses receive following an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspection.

Prior to the commission, Kaplan served as counsel, first to the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and then to the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee.

William Emanuel, a labor lawyer at Littler Mendelson in Los Angeles, has been tapped to fill a second open seat on the board, but the Senate has yet to vote on his nomination.

Republicans, however, are anxious to get the two vacancies filled.

“The board hasn’t had a full five members in nearly two years — one seat has been open for 23 months since President Obama declined to nominate a Republican for the then-minority seat, and the other seat for 11 month,” Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Examiner on Wednesday.

“We need a full board — and I’m certainly not the only one who thinks so.”

If Emanuel is confirmed, the balance of power on the board will shift from Democrats to Republicans for the first time in years. It’s a change welcomed by conservatives, who have long argued the board unfairly favors unions over employers.

Republicans and business groups have been fighting a 2015 NLRB ruling, which changed the definition of a joint-employer and made franchisors potentially liable for labor law violations committed by their franchisees. They have also opposed the board's 2014 rules to speed-up union elections.

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raga bs

Arizona won a successful challenge against the National Labor Relations Board which challenged the state’s constitutional amendment guaranteeing worker’s rights to vote by secret ballot on whether to join a union. This case set valuable precedent that will allow these issues to be resolved at the state, not federal, level.

 Republican AGs played a pivotal role in defeating the NLRB's politically motivated attempt to disallow Boeing's business expansion in South Carolina.  Republican AGs have called for tougher laws to prevent patent trolls from stifling American innovation

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https://thinkprogress.org/graduate-students-at-private-universities-win-big-victory-for-their-labor-rights-d5b0845dd78b#.qoavht1zr

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bush 43 made several recess appts; CoC3 lobbies

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National Association of Manufacturers v. National Labor Relations Board (2013)—A court approved a poster from the employer informing workers they had the right not to join a union, but struck down a rule requiring that a sign be posted informing workers of their right to form and join unions and bargain collectively, because the Constitution protects the corporation's right not to speak,

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from CoC 3

The Role of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the Anti-Union Network

Lobbying

• In 2004, the Chamber spent $24.5 million lobbying the federal government.8

• The Chamberworks closely with the Bush administration9 and prominent anti-labor conservatives on Capitol Hill such as Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA), head of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.  An anti-workplace safety zealot, Norwood was given the Chamber’s Spirit of Enterprise Award for his pro-Chamber voting record.  Norwood caused controversy this year for his insensitivity during Congressional hearings on the Sago mineworkers tragedy, and for lobbying loudly against renewal of the Voting Rights Act.
• The Chamber lobbies to oppose pro-worker legislation, including the Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act, Fair Minimum Wage Act, and an expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act.10

• Among the Chamber’s legislative priorities is opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act , which would strengthen labor law and provide workers with the right to union representation via the card check process when a majority present signed union authorization cards to their employers.11  On May 4, 2006, the Chamber sent a letter to all Republican members of Congress urging them to support the Secret Ballot Protection Act,12 which would outlaw union recognition through card check.  The Chamber also operates a website urging its members to pressure Congress on the issue.13

 Litigation

• Its recent litigation efforts include an attempt to strike down a California law prohibiting the use of tax dollars for anti-union activity, and litigation to overturn county “Peace Agreement” ordinances.14

• The Chamber recently filed amicus briefs in two significant cases before the National Labor Relations Board to argue for rulings that limit the ability of workers to form unions.  One case could define millions of workers as supervisors, revoking their right to organize, and the other could effectively quash the card check method of organizing.15

• The Chamber has also lobbied the Bush administration on nominations to the National Labor Relations Board,16 and succeeded in placing one of their staffers on the Board.  In 2002, President Bush appointed Michael Bartlett, then Director of Labor Law Policy for the Chamber, to sit on the five-member Board in a recess appointment that lasted nearly one year.

Sponsoring propaganda

http://shutthechamber.org/news/american-rights-work-us-chambers-anti-union-agenda

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stub

The National Labor Relations Board . . .

Board Members

• Robert J. Battista, Chairman
• Peter N. Kirsanow
• Wilma B. Liebman
• Peter C. Schaumber
• Dennis P. Walsh

• Ronald E. Meisburg (serving as NLRB General Counsel)

External links

• "While Congress Is on Recess, Bush Fills 12 Panel Positions," Associated Press (apfn.org), December 28, 2003.
• Tom Robbins, "Bush's Other War. At the national labor relations board, the president's appointees change the rules," The Village Voice, October 19, 2004.
• Tom Ichnioski, "Bush Fills NLRB Slot Through Recess Appointment," ENR News Record, January 6, 2006.

Category: 

• Labor

http://www.nlrb.gov/

The National Labor Relations Board is an independent federal agency that protects the rights of private sector employees to join together, with or without a union, to improve their wages and working conditions.

The Board

The Board has five Members and primarily acts as a quasi-judicial body in deciding cases on the basis of formal records in administrative proceedings. Board Members are appointed by the President to 5-year terms, with Senate consent, the term of one Member expiring each year.

The General Counsel

The General Counsel, appointed by the President to a 4-year term, is independent from the Board and is responsible for the investigation and prosecution of unfair labor practice cases and for the general supervision of the NLRB field offices in the processing of cases.

Division of Judges

The Division of Judges dockets, hears, settles, and decides unfair labor practice cases throughout the country.

Organization Chart

View the organizational structure of the NLRB.

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Ugly heads have been popping up lately from the National Right to Work Committee and the National  Right to Work LegalAttack Defense Foundation.

The Foundation supported the case against the Teamsters that resulted in Friday's court rulingthat President Obama's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional.The former showed up at a Pennsylvania news conference advocating a No Rights At Work bill:

Tuesday’s announcement was made at a news conference with about three dozen lawmakers, business officials, school board directors and political advocates, 20 of whom gave personal testimony on why they believe Pennsylvania should become a right-to-work state.

That included non-union member and public school employee Neil Weidman, and Mary Burkholder, a nurse and former union member. There was also a presence from the national right-to-work movement, includingJustin Davis of the National Right to Work Committee.

We thought we'd expose the vast right wing conspiracy behind these groups. (You didn't think it was working people, did you?)  They are part of an interlocking, billionaire-funded network that has a staggering reach.

Sourcewatch tells us the National No Rights At Work Legal Attack Foundation is funded by five foundations: Castle Rock, John M. Olin, Shelby Cullom Davis, Jaquelin Hume and Roe. Here are the gory details:

Castle Rock Foundation

Castle Rock, founded by the union-busting Coors family, gives money to more than 40 other billionaire-backed groups. (You can see them here.) Some of our least favorite phony think tanks and astroturf organizations are on the list: Dick DeVos' Mackinac Center, smear merchant Brent Bozell's Media Research Center and  Barre Seid and the Bradley's Scott Walker-loving Heartland Institute.

And of course the Coors help out the Benedict Arnold Koch brothers':{ALEC:{, Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Heritage Foundation, Landmark Legal Foundation, the National No Rights At Work Legal Defense Foundation. To name a few.}:

The money just sloshes around these groups.

John M. Olin Foundaton

John M. Olin, who made his fortune in munitions, created the foundation to promote free enterprise. Never mind that the biggest purchaser of munitions is government.  The foundation funds the same groups that the Castle Rock Foundation funds. According to Sourcewatch, the John M. Olin Foundation teams up with:

Joseph Coors and family, and Richard Mellon Scaife, to create a chain of anti-environmental, pro-business, legal advocacy organisations.

Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation

Davis was an investment banker (charming) who set up the foundation to support many of the same anti-worker groups supported by the Kochs, the Coors, the DeVoses, et al. The foundation is thankfully defunct.

Jaquelin Hume Foundation

Hume was a right-wing, Ronald Reagan-loving California businessman who made his fortune in dehydrated garlic and onion.Hume tried to bust the union at his Basic Vegetables plant in 1999 -- members of Teamsters Local 890. Now his union-busting legacy lives on in the foundation.

Roe Foundation

Thomas Roe was a South Carolina businessman who founded Builder Marts. He also founded a group called the State Policy Network, an ALEC-lite organization that gets money from -- you guessed it, Castle Rock, et al. Andy Kroll at Mother Jones reported in 2011:

...the State Policy Network(SPN) is a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement. Its mission is simple: to back a constellation of state-level think tanks loosely modeled after Heritage that promote free-market principles and rail against unions, regulation, and tax increases...

Founded in 1992 by businessman and Reagan administration insider Thomas Roe—who also served on the Heritage Foundation's board of trustees for two decades—the group has grown to include 59 "freedom centers," or affiliated think tanks, in all 50 states. SPN's board includes officials from Heritage and right-wing charities such as the Adolph Coors and Jacqueline Hume foundations. Likewise, its deep-pocketed donors include all the usual heavy-hitting conservative benefactors: the Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation, which funds the Cato Institute and Heritage; the Castle Rock Foundation, a charity started with money from the conservative Coors Foundation; and the Bradley Foundation, a $540 million charity devoted to funding conservative causes.

The National Right to Work Committee is linked directly (of course) with the Attack Foundation.  It's a little more secretive than the Foundation. Our friends at American Rights At Work report,

A lawsuit revealed that 84 percent of the National Right to Work Committee’s 1973 budget was funded by corporations, and other employers.

Early known donors include:

Wofford Camp who served on a U.S. Chamber of Commerce committee and was a California grower who fought efforts by farm workers to organize unions.

Roger Milliken, former president of Milliken & Company, who shut down one of his southern textile plants as retaliation against his employees’ vote to form a union…

...the Committee’s first chairman of the board was Edwin Dillard, president of Old Dominion Box Company, who vehemently fought his workers’ efforts to organize his company’s plants in the South.9  Fred Hartley, the Committee’s first president, was the former Congressman who sponsored the Taft-Hartley Act amending the National Labor Relations Act to expand employers’ rights, not workers.

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2013

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=367x10720

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