Thank you. Thank you so much. Please take a seat.
As I look around the room, I see a lot of old friends. Folks who have funded my campaigns, helped get me elected to office and to whom I owe a substantial amount.
Collectively, you have spent more than one billion dollars for my two presidential campaigns. You have put your blood, sweat and tears into my elections. And I will never forget that.
But, as I stand before you today, I can honestly say I have done quite a bit to repay that debt.
To start, I unlawfully nominated Sharon Block and Richard Griffin to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) while Congress was still in session. Three different federal appeals courts found my action to be unconstitutional and as a former constitutional law professor, it’s hard to argue I didn’t know better.
Rather than acting as an independent, non-partisan agency, the NLRB has blindly supported your vested interests. This is in large part because I broke from long-standing tradition and stacked the board with labor bosses to ensure you received the payback you have earned.
Throughout my presidency, the NLRB has promulgated rules and handed down decisions that heavily favored Big Labor. The NLRB approved “ambush” elections, which make it easier for unions to increase their membership by shortening the time for Board elections. The agency has even instituted a policy known as “micro-unions.” We have completely redefined the collective bargaining unit so that you don’t need a majority of workers. To make it easier since employees aren’t voluntarily deciding to join up, we have allowed you to create unions with as few as two or three people.
Under my administration, on behalf of each of you, the NLRB has also directly attacked companies seeking to create jobs. When Boeing opened an airline production facility in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, the NLRB’s acting general counsel took action and tried to stop it. The NLRB tried to close this billion-dollar factory employing thousands of Americans largely based on the premise that its employees were non-union workers.
Going forward, I can assure you that the Board will continue to fight against employees and employers. We can expect the NLRB to give union bosses increased access to employers’ private property. I can also promise you that the Board is working to grant labor organizers access to employees’ private contact information so you guys can “convince” them to join.
And it doesn’t stop there. We recently were able to get Thomas Perez confirmed as the new Secretary of the Department of Labor. Now, we had to threaten to alter Senate tradition, but that’s a small price to pay for friends.
Perez will vigorously pursue our ideological agenda and push legal boundaries to benefit you. In fact, my buddy Richard said he will be an “outstanding” secretary, who will be “more aggressive” than his predecessor.
And that starts with the “persuader rule.” Secretary Perez will work to rewrite labor law and force business owners to report to my – I mean our – government the names and compensation paid to attorneys and consultants who provide advice to management on unionization. We don’t care whether or not they communicate directly with employees, we want to know who they are and how much they make.
My friends, you have stood by me and even actively supported policies that have proven detrimental to your own best interests, most notably ObamaCare. For years, you blindly campaigned and organized on behalf of this cause, helping pave the way for its passage. And for that I plan to reward you with an exemption from the law’s mandate by making sure you can stay on your current health care plans, while receiving subsidies to cover the increased costs.
In closing, I want to thank you all for the unwavering support. I hope that we can continue to work together to pass policies that will enrich your leadership at the expense of the rest of the county.
(Note: even though the president did not address this year’s American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations Convention in Los Angeles, we decided to draft what those comments might have looked like had he attended)
Katie Packer Gage is a spokesperson for the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI).
