NLRB in the pocket of labor thugs

Opinion Journal:

The descent of the National Labor Relations Board from independent referee to a wholly owned AFL-CIO subsidiary is speeding up. Now its two Democratic appointees are attempting to ram through a new rule requiring quickie organizing elections, with barely any notice and little consultation with its sole GOP member.

Once a sleepy, ostensibly independent agency, the NLRB has become the point of the spear for Democratic labor policy since Republicans took the House last year. Earlier this year its general counsel sued to block Boeing from making its planes at a new plant in South Carolina, a case that is still proceeding and could kill thousands of jobs.

Now Chairman Mark Pearce, an Obama appointee, says he'll hold a vote next Wednesday on rules to shorten the time frame for union elections. The fire drill is intended to approve the union-favored plan before the recess appointment of the board's other Democrat expires and they lose their quorum.

President Obama gave longtime union lawyer Craig Becker a recess appointment in March 2010 after even Senate Democrats considered him too radical to confirm, but that appointment expires at the end of the year. The Obama appointees need at least two of the NLRB's three occupied seats (two are vacant) to approve new rules.

Originally floated in June as a proposed rule-making, the plan would shorten to as little as 10 to 14 days the period between the time a union seeks an election to organize a work site and the election date. Under current rules, companies typically have five to six weeks to make their case to employees before the union holds a secret-ballot election. The Becker-Pearce putsch would give labor organizers months to quietly pitch workers, then give targeted companies less than two weeks to react and make their own case before a quickie election.

This is Big Labor's version of speed dating, and no wonder. Union membership is down to some 7% of the private workforce, and falling. Fewer workers want to join unions as they see what has happened to the competitiveness of union-dominated industries. Labor's response is to rig the rules so that companies have little time and fewer resources to educate workers about the risks posed by unions. When unions couldn't get a "card check" bill banning secret-ballot elections through even a Democratic Congress, they turned to the NLRB for this and other dirty work.

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The unions know they cannot win a fair election so they try to stack the deck and not give the companies time to mount a defense against the unfair labor practices of the unions.