Scott Brown and the derailment of Obama’s labor agenda

With Democrats losing their Senate super-majority due to Scott Brown’s unlikely Massachusetts victory, expect Democrats to look for new ways to appease anxious interest groups like organized labor. Lacking the 60 votes needed to get anything out of the Senate, Capitol Hill is increasingly looking like a legislative graveyard for Big Labor’s priorities.

Big Labor’s most recent casualty is Craig Becker, President Obama’s nominee to the National Labor Relations Board. Early last week Democrats joined a unified Republican minority to oppose Becker, former associate general council to the Service Employees International Union. Becker, who once said, “Workers should not be able to choose against having a union as their monopoly-bargaining agent,” perfectly articulated the goal of the modern labor movement: to forcibly corral as many people into unions as possible.

With the seating of Sen. Brown, the unions feel they have lost their chances to pass labor’s most coveted piece of legislation, the Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act, aka “card-check.” EFCA would eliminate private ballots from union elections opening the door for harassment and intimidation of workers who oppose unionization.

As that window closed, another opened in the form of Craig Becker. Although over 75 percent of Americans disapprove of card-check, the NLRB can implement identical policy, making the vote for Becker so significant. Labor viewed his defeat as a defeat for de-facto card-check, as Becker could change labor law via an appointment to the board. Specifically, Becker would help the unions get more of the type of card-check certifications they already can achieve under law, by ignoring or dismissing the complaints filed by employers and individual workers. This gives the unions a much freer hand to exercise their extortionate and deceptive means of getting signatures and pressuring employers to accept the signatures in lieu of votes.

With the Senate defeat of Becker, labor is now pressuring the White House to recess-appoint him, circumventing the Senate, for a one-year period. The seat on the NRLB he is after is a five-year seat. Days after Sen. Brown takes office, Obama’s labor agenda gets derailed for the time being.

However this year’s employment data reveals organized labor’s route back to power. Private-sector union membership has reached an all-time low at 7.2 percent, down 834,000 from their 2008 level. With more industries taking note of the hard lesson learned by the American auto industry, it is expected this number will continue to decrease. However the unions’ silver lining lies with the drones of government employees filling our ever-expanding bureaucracy. And secondly, for the first time in history, over 50 percent of all union members now work for the government at some level. With an increased incentive for bigger government, based purely on self-preservation, unions are ramping up their political activism.

With the Senate pushing back against labor’s coercive agenda, unions have retreated to smoke-filled rooms to circumvent the legislative branch and win a series of victories.

On the state and local level, unions have been busy corralling indirect or direct recipients of state aid into collective bargaining agreements. Last summer, de-facto Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) signed an executive order allowing in-home providers for mentally disabled children who receive state aid to be unionized. Should unions successfully organize Illinois’ in-home providers, as much as 2 percent of the caregiver’s state aid would go into union coffers. Illinois is joining 12 other states in forcing in-home providers under the union bus.

Although the Democrats’ health care overhaul has stalled, it is worth remembering the deal union bosses struck with the White House in early January when such legislation was deemed inevitable. In exchange for union support, the Democrats agreed to exempt union health care plans from any new taxes. While plans with similar benefits would be subject to tax rates as high as 40 percent, health care plans negotiated under forced union collective bargaining agreements would remain tax-free. Unions got the legislation they wanted while making everyone else pay for it, and it was accomplished behind closed doors without transparency.

With a risk-averse Senate and a disenchanted public, a majority of Americans now disapprove of unions; union bosses know their future hinges on their ability to bypass Congress and the American people. With the Brown complication, labor law changes may go the route of carbon regulation—leaving the dirty work up to regulators and heads of various bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the NLRB.

Scott Brown’s victory not only broke the Democratic 60-seat majority, but his election sent a message to Senate Democrats, “slow down.” So while labor bosses may not be front and center shaking hands with Democratic Senators, they will be busy behind the scenes looking for new, non-legislative ways to achieve their aims.

Brian Johnson is federal affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform. Co-author Christopher Prandoni is with the Alliance for Worker Freedom and Americans for Tax Reform.