Senator John McCain has placed a hold on Craig Becker, one of Obama's three appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which means that there will be no vote soon on the trio of nominees, leaving the NLRB with two functioning members, one a Republican and one a Democrat.

Under such deadlocked circumstances, the NLRB has been fairly quiet, but don't look for that to last. Once the stalemate in the Senate is resolved, the board will have a voting-in-lockstep majority of three Democrats with Big Business in their crosshairs.

First to go, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will be the power of employers to influence unionization votes. This will be done through rulemaking (actually, rule changing) rather than through the legislative process (think EFCA) as the board flexes its unused-under-Bush considerable muscles.

Rules to be implemented include shortening the time-frame between vote announcements and the actual balloting, which is currently set at 42 days but usually comes in around the 39-day mark. Shortening the elapsed time between announcement and balloting will afford employers less time to "brainwash and intimidate" their employees, as labor organizers call it. The board also is weighing whether to move the vote from the company site to a neutral one and whether to bar employers' representatives from observing the vote.

With just these few changes, the odds of union votes succeeding would appear to rise exponentially–to say nothing of how easy it would be for organizers to game the whole vote absent employer observation. (Maybe Jimmy Carter will volunteer to be a–har de har har–impartial observer.)

So if the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is Armageddon, as the Chamber earlier labeled it, the new NLRB is nothing short of Godzilla on the horizon, so don't buy any real estate in Tokyo anytime soon.