Politics turns hearing on union election rules into three-ring circus

Before the dust settled, the lone Republican on the board had threatened to quit, a Democratic congressman warned of outside pressure – from the GOP’s Right Wing – to get him to do so, web headlines and blogs made that pressure obvious, and the GOP-run House voted on party lines to jam through a bill halting the board’s planned action, after killing its other enforcement powers last month.

And through it all, the NLRB majority debated and approved a resolution telling its staff to go ahead and draft the union election rules into legal language, prior to another vote between now and New Year’s Eve. In the end, the board’s GOP member, Brian Hayes, stayed put and the resolution passed on a 2-1 party-line NLRB vote.

At issue is the NLRB’s effort to end some of the endless procedural obstacles that now get in the way of scheduling union elections and then counting the votes, according to agency chairman Gaston Pearce.

In written testimony and at two days of NLRB hearings this summer, unions strongly supported the NLRB’s proposals. They said the proposals would eliminate some of the delays and legal hurdles firms now use to frustrate – legally or illegally – workers’ voices on the job. Unions’ biggest complaint: The NLRB didn’t go far enough.

Business groups just as strongly opposed NLRB’s plan. Business lobbies orchestrated the majority of the 65,000 comments on the rule that swamped the board.

On Nov. 30, Pearce wasn’t even offering the proposed union election rule itself – just a resolution authorizing drafting language. But he used the occasion to justify it.

“The vast majority of NLRB-supervised elections, about 90%, are held by agreement of the parties – employees, union and employer – in an average of 38 days from the filing of a petition. The amendments I propose would not affect those agreed-to elections,” he said.

Instead, they “apply to the minority of elections held up by needless litigation and disputes which need not be resolved prior to an election. In these contested elections, employees have to wait an average of 101 days to cast a ballot. As several employees testified at our hearing in July, that period can be disruptive and painful for all involved.”

Tactics that business uses to delay and defy union organizing include pre-election appeals to the board and “raising irrelevant issues in pre-election hearings,” turning the hearings into legal battles, Pearce said.

The board’s proposed rule “would simply address these procedures, by limiting subjects that can be raised in a pre-election hearing to those that are directly relevant to the election, and postponing any election-related appeals to the board until after the election,” Pearce said. Dropped from the proposal were other ideas, such as requiring firms to turn over e-mail addresses of eligible voters in election campaigns

But just the very thought of having the NLRB approve any union election rules at all set off an uproar by the Radical Right and the congressional Republicans.

Last weekend, Hayes, the lone Republican among the three current board members – there are two vacancies – threatened to resign before the Nov. 30 afternoon meeting on the resolution. If he had, the board would be left with only two members, and would lack a quorum to pass the union election rules resolution, or anything else.

Hayes got pressure from Radical Right blogs, led by redstate.com and the National Review, to quit. In the end, he didn’t. Their pressure angered Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

Miller demanded disclosure of who was pressuring Hayes to quit and why –- and whether the Right offered Hayes a quid pro quo in employment if he resigned. Miller asked Hayes for all documents between Hayes and outside parties, about resignation.

“I have read reports of special interest organizations and individuals calling on you to resign precisely to incapacitate the board. I am also in receipt of a Nov. 21, 2011 letter from Chairman Pearce to you indicating you have indeed threatened to resign. Open calls to resign, followed by the threats you allegedly have made, raise the specter of private requests as well. I am concerned that any decision to resign prematurely will be the result of objectionable motives or improper influence,” Miller wrote Hayes.

Adding to the brouhaha, the Republican-run House provided the third ring of the D.C. circus by passing legislation – approved last month by the GOP-run Education and the Workforce Committee on a party-line vote – explicitly stripping the NLRB of power to change union election rules. The vote was 235-188, with the GOP favoring it 229-8. But that ring of the circus stopped there: Senate Labor Committee Chairman Thomas Harkin, D-Iowa, promised a crowd at the AFL-CIO the same day that he “will do whatever I can to stop” the bill.

Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.