Posted by Labor Law Guy | Posted on 11-02-2010
Category : Federal Labor Law
Tags: Barack Obama, Craig Becker, James Hoffa, NLRB
Even a couple of Democrats from states that generally vote Republican joined the GOP in keeping alive a Senate filibuster on the nomination vote for Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Now, with our hard-working Senators set to take next week off for a Presidents' Day recess (how many of you have the week off?), Barack Obama has hinted at some recess appointments. Trouble with those, however, is that they're only good until the next election, which just happens to be later this year.
Anyway, we'll find out soon enough. In the meantime, though, I got a good chuckle out of reading a hypocrisy-laden critique of the Senate's filibuster by International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) President James Hoffa,to wit:
“The President ought to be able to appoint who he wants to sit on the NLRB. Politics should not stand in the way of a well qualified [sic] appointee. "
Substitute Robert Bork as the rejected appointee and the Supreme Count for the NLRB, and do you think Hoff would ever utter such a concept?
I was one of the many millions who gave Richard Nixon the largest electoral landslide in history in 1972 largely because of his opponent, George McGovern, who seemed at the time the farthest left of the far left, totally pinko capable if not outright functioning.
After the Senate, however, McGovern ventured into the real world and became a businessman who operated a hotel. He learned his lessons.
In 2008, McGovern came out as completely against the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), the much-written-about proposal to unionize companies through employees’ signing cards.
Today in the Wall Street Journal, he repeated his opposition and gave additional reasons, including the mandatory contract arbitration part, which he said would be “an abrogation of freedom,” using the words of AFL-CIO icon George Meany of all unlikely people.
However much I agree with McGovern on EPCA, I still part company with him on his appraisal of Barack Obama as an “exceptional president” (I agree if by that one means “out of line”) and with his view that the Democratic Congressional majorities are “well deserved.”
Still, I never thought I’d give McGovern any business-sense credit, but there you go–put your own money, and not the government’s, on the line, and you make these common-sense evaluations and decisions. Are you listening, Barack Obama?
If you thought that four years late and $350 million over budget for the largely unneeded U.S. Capitol Visitor Center was bad, wait till you see what the projects flowing from the recent $787 billion stimulus package will cost.
The 1931 David-Bacon Act (which obviously did nothing to shorten or alleviate the Great Depression) provides that contractors for government construction projects pay a “prevailing wage” to all employees. The prevailing wage–natch–is set by the government itself, and with the Obama people running things, only Karl Marx himself knows how high that can go.
Davis-Bacon was enshrined and expanded to cover virtually everything in the recent stimulus package, so the sewer next to you might end up costing 300 percent of what it would normally cost on the open market.
Wait, it gets better. Not only is Davis-Bacon being married to stimulus projects, but Obama has issued an executive order requiring project labor agreements (PLAs) for major construction projects, currently those costing $25 million or more, but surely and shortly to be lowered by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who has authority over such matters.
PLAs require contractors to accede to all union demands regarding work rules, working conditions, pay, hiring (which must be done in union hiring halls), and union dues (which must be paid even by non-union members). A PLA was and is in place for the infamous Big Dig in Boston, which the Boston Globe projects will cost at least $22 billion, after being budgeted at $6 billion, and not be paid off until at least 2038.
Now, the irony here is that it’s Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Care medical program that the Obamaites are hoping to copy for the rest of us, and that plan makes the cost overruns of the Big Big pale in comparison.
Why does this seem like deja Great Depression all over again?
Sources at Personnel Concepts indicate that the much-feared-by-business Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) will be introduced in the House of Representatives today.
Well, nothing new here. EFCA made it through the House’s 435 members once before and passed with flying colors, but its fate in the Senate may be another matter altogether. Just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Labor Bill Faces Threat in Senate” because of some suddenly wavering Democratic support.
Whether this wavering is just posturing or temporary remains to be seen, but EFCA does require 60 votes in the Senate to pass. Without 60 votes, a bill can be filibustered into extinction, which is exactly what the Republicans would gladly do to this piece of legislation.
EFCA, also called “card check” because it does away with the requirement for secret-ballot unionization votes and makes certification by majority signatures possible, has come under a withering attack from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which called it “Armageddon”) and other business groups. Even Obama supporter and billionaire investor Warren Buffett came out against EFCA in a CNBC interview yesterday.
Time will tell what happens to EFCA, but I’m sure the folks at Personnel Concepts will keep us up to date with its news alerts.
The liberal media are all over themselves anointing Barack Obama as not only the second FDR but also the second Abraham Lincoln (which Obama seems to be vainly promoting himself).
Since for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the blogosphere is already debunking FDR (I don’t think anyone would take on Lincoln). Some sites, including Motley Fool and Michelle Malkin, have dredged up a four-year-old research finding that attempted to show how FDR actually prolonged the depression by 7 years, thus making it forever remembered as the Great Depression.
UCLA economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian, using a unique argument, claim that the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) allowed companies to avoid collusion charges so long as they let wages be determined by collective bargaining. Thus, both wages and prices rose by about 25 percent, choking off both new hiring and new spending. In other words, companies acceded to collective bargaining and then colluded with one another to fix prices.
“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”
It’s a fun argument, but there’s a big problem with their basic thesis. The NIRA was implemented in 1933 and ruled unconstitutional two years later.
Read “FDR’s policies prolonged Depression by 7 years” and see what you think.
