Since taking office, Pres. Barack Obama has shown a remarkable penchant for changing the law by fiat. From Citizenship and Immigration Services’ debating how best to let the maximum number of illegal aliens off the hook to the EPA’s declaring it would treat carbon-dioxide emissions as a pollutant, the administration has taken the stance that votes in Congress aren’t really necessary, even for dramatically contentious subjects. Who needs a debate and a vote when you can rule by regulatory decree?
One critically important example of this was the 2010 decision by the National Mediation Board — a body whose three members are appointed by the president — that made it far easier for airline and railroad unions to take power over those industries by changing the way union elections are held. This week, the House is considering a law that would reverse the decision. The law deserves support without reservation, and the House’s vote will be a sign of what’s to come from the new Congress on labor.
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The dispute can be traced back to the Railway Labor Act, a 1926 law that made it relatively difficult for railroad workers to unionize — the idea being that without serious limits on union power, labor organizations could hold the nation’s crucial transportation infrastructure hostage to unreasonable demands. The following decade, none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt expanded the law to cover America’s emerging airline sector as well.
One limit the law puts on airline unions is that in order to unionize, they need consent from “the majority of any craft or class of employees.” Note that there’s a difference between the “majority . . . of employees” and the majority of employees who choose to vote in a union election. The way the law is written, if a “craft or class” — say, flight attendants or customer-service workers — has 100 members, and only 80 cast votes, the union still needs 51 votes, not 41, to win the right to represent the workers. This puts the onus on the unions to get the word out and increase turnout.
The National Mediation Board — which has decided RLA disputes since 1934 — interpreted the law this way for its first 75 years. But then, Obama took office and changed the composition of the board to 2–1 Democrat. In 2010, with no deliberation by Congress whatsoever — but with urging from the unions — the NMB simply changed course, declaring that from now on, a majority of voting employees is all that’s needed to unionize a work group. The board made several smaller changes as well, all of which favored the unions.
The unions immediately began exploiting this rule change. In the case of the Delta-Northwest merger, the unions already had filed election applications before the rule change, but withdrew them and then re-filed so that the elections could take place under the new rules.
Congress needs to reassert itself in the face of the NMB’s brazen sop to the unions, and the law now under consideration in the House — Title IX of the FAA Reauthorization Bill — would do just that, overriding the policy change. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee shot down an amendment that would have removed the provision by a 30–29 margin (three Republicans sided with the unions), and a similar amendment will no doubt be proposed when the bill goes before the entire House this week.
Title IX will force the NMB to interpret the RLA to mean what it says — what it has been held to have said for 75 years — and insist that Congress be the entity to make major changes to labor law. It will also make it more difficult for unions to grab hold of airline employees, in many against the will of a great number of those workers. (Under collective bargaining, when a majority of workers vote to unionize, the union gets to represent all employees.)
If the new House is serious about free markets and the rule of law, it will not hesitate to enact this legislation.
Does any of this stuff really suprise anyone? One can only hope that the new POTUS in 2012 has the guts to put the current POTUS (if you can call him that) behind bars where he belongs. The man is a FRAUD! Makes Jimmy Carter look like a genious.
The part of collective bargaining that I most hate is the provision that I have to pay for a representation that I DIDN'T ask for, and don't want.
Fair Share?
My Aunt Fanny!
The unions classify so much of what they do (outside of the actual bargaining) as "educational" - which, in the case of many unions, means pro-socialist propaganda. The teachers union that covered my system provided "professional development" to members. It amounted to membership-paid attempts to "raise the consciousness" of the proletariat - that is, the teachers they supposedly represented.
So much money and time was wasted on promoting the agendas of the socialist leadership - Living Wage campaign, boycotts, and other Democratic objectives (including HEAVY campaigning for their people during election years).
They followed the Alinsky method - focus on their own agenda, don't waste time with individual grievances. See link: External Link
for more details about how it's done.
What happens when morality gets to be decided by human beings? Why, we can choose to change how we interpret laws however we feel like it! And people call this "progress" and "enlightened thought".
This is one more example, out of the many we know about, of the Obama administration calculating what action (or inaction) will have the most adverse effect on our culture, economy, security, or existence as a nation. It's not incompetence.
@rightlibertarian
While you're chucking God out the window, ask yourself what force, power, or code is safeguarding your libertarian proclivities. Are they all that safe if the rules can be rewritten on a whim? Tyranny by the mob, by the king, by whatever... Its still coercive. How do you propose to restrain it?
Regardless of whether or not you belive in the divine, a body of moral and ethical guidance that has survived 2000 years largely unchanged might be a good place to start.
Attempts at invalidating existing moral norms without and abiding replacement are an invitation to anarchy, and antagonistic to any meaninful durable personal liberty.
I don't agree with this approach, but Bush circumvented the limits imposed on him by Congress (separation of powers and all of that) by issuing signing statements.
While not strictly relevant to the article, one of the "gotchas" of the railroad workers act was that is supersedes "a right to work state".
In my younger days I was a aircraft mechanic. I worked in many of the multitudes of defence centric aircraft plants in the Dallas area. Vought and General Dynamics being two you may have heard of. Since Texas is a right to work state I had the choice whether to join the union or not. One place (Lear-Siegler) even paid a dollar an hour more to non-union workers (I always assumed the extra 40 or so per week was cheaper than the grievances and dealing with shop stewards etc.)
At Vought, where the UAW "represented" the workers, we were a major sub-contractor on the B1-B program. You may recall that is the program President Carter canceled and President Reagan revived.
Now guess which of those Presidents the Union at Vought loved and supported and who they hated.
Why would I ever volunteer to join a union so bent on getting rid of *my* job?
All that changed though when I went to work for a Dallas area airline. Suddenly I no longer had any choice. I was in the Teamsters like it or not.
to the various left-leaning-lurkers -
can you please explain the thought process behind supporting modern US unions as they are presently in this world economy? Not 100 years ago, not in 3rd world countries... Seriously, I would like to know!!
pdevlin: Don't be taken in by the lies of the left. Signing statements are nothing more than the presidents views on how a law is to be interpreted. Something that is very legitimate for a president to do. Especially given the fact that the constitution gives to the president the responsibility for executing those same laws. How can one execute a law if one does not interpret it first.
@MarkW
I respectfully disagree with you on this. I think Bush used these statements to increase the power of the executive branch at the expense of the Congress - what Obama is doing in a different way. Bush did not use the statements to merely interpret laws, but to effectively nullify them as they related to the executive branch. His statements were usually very broad and brief and rarely mentioned the legal authority being relied on.
What about the courts? The law says what the law says. If the union gets 41 of 80 votes cast, and this is less than half of the total number of employees eligible to vote, can the employer challenge the NMB's decision in court and assert that the union did not get majority of the votes as required by law?
Do you think that what's wrong with unions is the people who run them? Maybe they need some good people running them just as we need some statesmen and women running the government not a bunch of creepy critters running the joint.
First of all, you left out that the Delta Flight Attendants, STILL VOTED FOR NO UNION, even after the change. Which in effect nullifies this whole argument.
Second of all, despite being highly unionized, front-line airline employees have borne the brunt of the industy depression for the last ten years. I have had my pension cancelled, my retirement stock nullified in bankruptcy, my salary cut by more than 50%, and gone from Captain to Copilot, all to subsidize low fares in a hyper-competitive industry.
All unions gain from this change is an election process like, you know, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. You vote yes or no. Not yes or no or no vote equals no.
Reminded of the 1952 United Steelworkers of America Strike against US Steel. Truman responded by nationalizing the American Steel industry. In a landmark decision the US supreme court ruled in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. vs. Sawyer the president didn't have the authority to seize the still mills. The strikers essentially won on the terms proposed four months earlier. In the brief the Supreme Court stated "the government does not perceive how Article II (of the Constitution) can be read so as to limit the Presidential power to meet all emergencies," and ... claims that the finding of the emergency is 'not subject to judicial review.' To my mind this spells a form of government alien to our Constitutional government of limited powers. I therefore find that the acts of defendant are illegal and without authority of law
