The Obama Administration, expecting that we’re in an age where the normal rules of politics apply and not an age of nullification, nominated two labor officials for open slots on the National Labor Relations Board. That board will see previous recess appointments expire at the end of the year, leaving it without a quorum and unable to function. The two appointees would fill the Democratic spots on the board.

This is why it’s nice to have a Democratic majority on the National Labor Relations Board: workers get rights. The National Labor Relations Board ruled that an employee can safely discuss work issues with their co-workers on Facebook without fearing punishment by their employer.

National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Ronald Meisburg will resign from his post before the end of June, about two months shy of the official end of his term. Yesterday, the law firm which Meisburg plans to join, Proskauer Rose LLP, trumpeted his hire in a press release. The firm, and Meisburg, are quite shameless about the revolving door problem, it seems. Not only did Proskauer Rose brag about the hire, but it gleefully reported that the addition of Meisburg will allow its management clients to better fight the “activist role” of the “Obama NLRB.”

Today President Obama announced a series of recess appointments, including – count ‘em – two seats on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Both appointees, Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, are Democrats nominees. A third nominee, Brian Hayes, a staffer for Senator Mike Enzi, was left behind to be voted on by the Senate.

Sen. John McCain is now two for two: Craig Becker, one of Barack Obama’s three nominations to the National Labor Relations Board will have a hearing before the Senate HELP Committee next week, marking a victory for John McCain and the Republicans.

      Imagine voting on a ballot initiative and knowing that everyone who didn’t show up at the polls still got to vote—because their votes would be counted as “No.” That’s the process for airline and railway workers when they vote on whether to join a union. The election results are tallied not by [...]

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republicans John DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.

Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:

The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it.

Someone responded yesterday to an AFL-CIO blog in which we mentioned that just days before leaving office, Bush got a whole new set of nearly $600,000 china for the White House. The fellow who commented was rightly appalled.

I don’t know about the rest of you who are reading this, but I am just barely making it the way it is.

Today, I’d like to introduce Marcy Rein, a retired member of OPEIU Local 29, who worked in the ILWU Organizing Department for most of the Blue Diamond campaign she describes below. The Blue Diamond workers’ years-long effort to gain a union recently ended with a loss, and Rein vividly describes how that experience demonstrates yet again why we need passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

For four years, the workers on the organizing committee at the Blue Diamond Growers (BDG) plant in Sacramento, Calif., had done everything they could to avoid being where they were on the night of Nov. 19.

Tuesday’s vote by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) paving the way for more media monopoly was a slap against the public will, which overwhelmingly opposes further consolidation. The 3–2 vote took part in a Bush Republican-packed regulatory agency unaccountable to voters whose master is the party of the president.

Proving that executive signing statements aren’t the only easy way for a presidential administration to bypass such trivialities as the democratic legislative process, federal regulatory agencies under the Bush administration have taken partisanship to an extreme.

So extreme, one such agency, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), is purposely pursuing an ideological agenda—one that rolls over workers, seeking to create a Dickensian world in which we all must futilely ask our employers: “Please, sir, may I have another?” NLRB chairman Robert Battista admitted as much last week in testimony before a joint House-Senate subcommittee hearing on the NLRB and its impact on workers’ rights.