NLRB escapes elimination, but budget to be slashed

If that cut, part of the massive money bill lawmakers debated through the week of Feb. 14-17, makes it through Congress and Democratic President Barack Obama, the agency would have to furlough its workers for two months, a spokeswoman says.

Every one of the 190 Democrats voting opposed killing the agency, which oversees and rules on labor-management relations for most U.S. industries and workers. Republicans voted 176-60 to kill the NLRB.

The move to eliminate the NLRB, offered by Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., was so extreme that even Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., an ardent foe of workers’ rights and new chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, voted “no.”

So did every Republican representative from Wisconsin, whose GOP governor, the same week, tried to abolish collective bargaining for public workers. That “no” tally included House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who is leading the GOP’s spending-slashing brigade.

Other GOP “no” votes came from several Ohio lawmakers, several Michigan lawmakers, at least two GOP freshmen plus two GOP veterans from Illinois, Reps. JoAnne Emerson and Sam Graves, R-Mo., and Rep. Chip Cravaack, the upset winner last year over longtime pro-worker Democrat James Oberstar of Duluth, Minn.

The brief debate the day before the vote roused the minority Democrats to defend the NLRB against Price’s onslaught. Price charged the “out-of-control” NLRB is “rigging the deck” for unions and workers.

“This creates chaos and denies people rights, be they employers or employees, be they pro-union or anti-union, whatever it is,” replied Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., top Democrat on the Workforce panel – a panel whose name the GOP changed from “Education and Labor.”

Had Price’s amendment passed, Miller added, workers who are “fired every day for simply suggesting…they would like to have a union” would be left “without a job and (with) no right of action to find out whether” they “were wrongfully fired.”

This article was written by Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.

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