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House-Senate Hearing: Bush NLRB Radically Overhauling Labor Law
The Bush National Labor Relations Board is systematically working to overhaul federal labor law enacted to protect workers’ collective bargaining rights, witnesses told a joint House-Senate hearing yesterday. The board is “divorced” from the law’s values and its goals and is waging an unprecedented war against long-established workers’ rights.
Wilma Liebman, the lone Democrat on the NLRB, said the board has gone far beyond the slight shifts in ideology and policy each administration seeks when a new president appoints NLRB members.
Something different is going on—more ’sea change’ than ’see-saw.’ The current board, it seems to me, is divorced from the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), its values, and its goals….Virtually every recent policy choice by the board impedes collective bargaining, creates obstacles to union representation, or favors employer interests.…No wonder that there has been loss of faith in the board.
Before a panel from the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions and the Senate Employment and Workplace Safety Subcommittee, witnesses said the NLRB’s Republican majority has made it harder for workers to join unions and bargain—while making it less costly for employers to break the law and fire workers who want a union.
As AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt told the lawmakers:
Since its installation in 2002, the Bush administration’s Labor Board has embarked on a systematic and insidious effort to radically overhaul our federal labor law and its regulation of labor relations in the private sector. Its decisions are not merely a pendulum swing or a course correction at times characteristic of changes in political administrations. Rather, they evince a calculated effort to make fundamental changes to our nation’s labor law.
The Bush NLRB’s rulings include a set of sweeping decisions issued in September that put more power in management’s hands and helped bury many workplace freedoms. Last year, the board redefined the term “supervisor” to deny as many 8 million workers the freedom to join unions.
Erin Johansson on the American Rights at Work new “Eye on the NLRB” blog writes that the biggest surprise at yesterday’s hearing was NLRB Chairman Robert Battista acknowledgment that:
He no longer believes that the primary purpose of the National Labor Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining.
While for years I’ve written that this Board is more concerned with management rights than with the rights of workers to have a union contract, I’m surprised Battista publicly articulated that his Board gives less weight to the promotion of collective bargaining than what the NLRA’s drafters originally intended.
After several members of the subcommittees charged that the Bush Labor Board has failed to uphold this original purpose, Battista implied that the Taft-Hartley Amendment of 1947 repealed the primary goal of the NLRA, which had been to promote collective bargaining.
Feliza Ryland was a housekeeper at the Grosvenor Resorts in Orlando, Fla., when she and some of her co-workers were fired after going on strike when contract negotiations stalled. In 2001, before Bush stacked the NLRB with anti-worker members, the NLRB agreed the workers were illegally fired and entitled to back pay.
Later, the Bush NLRB ruled Ryland and other workers were not entitled to full back pay because they did not leave the picket line soon enough. The NLRB said the workers forfeited the right to full back pay because they picketed for several weeks in an attempt to get their jobs back—jobs from which they had been unlawfully terminated—rather than looking for new employment. Giving full back pay would “promote idleness,” the majority said. Ryland testified yesterday:
It has now been more than 11 years since I was unlawfully fired, and I am still waiting to see the back pay, still waiting to see justice Workers who are fired for trying to organize and bargain for a better life have been mistreated for exercising their rights. It should not take so long to get justice.
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Channels: Organizing & Bargaining, Legislation & Politics
We've chronicled the Bush National Labor Relations Board's unprecedented war against long-established workers' rights, and yesterday a joint House and Senate hearing delved deep into the NLRB's deliberate abuse of workers' rights. Says Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.): "This president has stacked the deck against workers." In decision after decision, says Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, "workers' rights have been under near-constant assault in the years since the start of the Bush administration."
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