As we close out the final weeks of President Obama’s administration, an enlightening new study has been released highlighting just how partisan the Obama-era National Labor Relations Board has been. More than any other NLRB in history, it turns out.
The study, conducted by labor attorneys at the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and Workplace Policy Institute, found that over the last eight years the Board has been doing more to pad the pockets of union bosses than to protect America’s workforce. To those following labor policy, this should come as no surprise.
“Precedent matters. Longstanding precedent matters most of all,” begins the report. Obama’s NLRB, however, has upended years of established labor law, overturning 91 precedents — most of which had previously been approved by board members of both parties. And that figure doesn’t even take into account recent decisions that have been invalidated by the Supreme Court.
The study found, “In each case where the Obama Board changed the law, the resulting new law became more favorable to labor interests than it did under previous Board rulings — frequently at the expense of promoting stable bargaining and economic growth and without regard for balancing the interests of business, labor and employees.”
Notably, of the 91 cases overturned, not a single Republican board member voted in support.
In a dangerous overreach of power, the Obama NLRB over the last several years has been given free rein under Obama’s liberal agenda to restructure America’s workplace operations, to the detriment of employers, small businesses and worker freedom.
Take the ambush election rule, for example, which took effect in April 2015 and dramatically shortened the window of time between a union petition and an election — eliminating the minimum 25-day period that gave employers time to prepare. Thanks to this decision, we’ve seen unions spring elections in as few as nine days.
Besides stifling speech between employers and employees, the ambush election rule fails to give management time to make their case or hire outside counsel to help with the process and certify voter eligibility — which the rule determines can now be decided after the election takes place. And it was unnecessary. Issues with prolonged election times were few and far in between, with more than 95 percent of elections happening within two months. The ambush election rule, however, did succeed in increasing unionization, with union election wins up by 8 percent in the first six months, compared to the comparable time period in 2012 and 2013.
Obama’s NLRB micro-union decision is perhaps even worse. The Board’s reasoning in the 2011 case, Specialty Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center of Mobile, allowed unions to organize sub-units of a workplace, as opposed to the workplace as a whole. Specialty Healthcare redefined the traditional bargaining unit standard that union elections had operated under throughout history, allowing Big Labor to gain a foothold in a workplace even if the majority of the workforce was against unionization. By cherry-picking individuals more predisposed to join into various subgroups, Obama’s NLRB granted Big Labor a key tool to increase their odds of winning elections and increasing membership.
Additionally, corporate America today is still reeling from the joint employer standard, the result of NLRB’s Browning-Ferris decision, which fundamentally altered the definition of an employer and made companies liable for potential labor-law violations by their franchisees or contractors. There’s so much confusion surrounding the new standard that it’s been deemed “unworkable” by the business community at large.
Indeed, the Obama-era NLRB will be remembered as an anti-jobs agency that, time and again, rewarded union bosses by rolling back decades of long-standing precedent. Fortunately, its reversal of longstanding law makes it ripe for reform under the incoming administration, which has come into power pledging to promote America’s business interests, stand up for its employees and get the country back to work. Step one of the incoming Trump administration must be to reverse the considerable damage caused by these anti-business bureaucrats and unwind their damaging decisions that have hurt America’s workers.
