ACORN’s Ally at the National Labor Relations Board

by Publius

Today’s Wall Street Journal has this story about an Obama appointee to the NLRB:

One of Big Labor’s priorities in Washington is to place allies in key government jobs where they can overturn existing labor policy without battles in Congress. This is a very good reason for the Senate to hold a hearing on the nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Mr. Becker is associate general counsel at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is most recently in the news for its close ties to Acorn, the disgraced housing shakedown operation. President Obama nominated Mr. Becker in April to the five-member NLRB, which has the critical job of supervising union elections, investigating labor practices, and interpreting the National Labor Relations Act. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, Mr. Becker argued for rewriting current union-election rules in favor of labor. And he suggested the NLRB could do this by regulatory fiat, without a vote of Congress.

Yet now that he could soon have the power to act on this conviction, Mr. Becker won’t tell Congress if this is what he still believes. In written responses to questions from Republican Orrin Hatch, Mr. Becker promised only to “maintain an open mind about whether [his] suggestions should be implemented in any manner.” That sounds like his mind is made up but he won’t admit it lest it hurt his confirmation.

Whole editorial is here.

It is interesting that ACORN will now have an ally on the NLRB. In the 1990’s, ACORN was fined by the NLRB for, wait for it…union-busting activities. Some ACORN employees wanted to organize a union and ACORN fought back by firing the employees. The feeling that ACORN is above the law isn’t a new phenomenon, it seems.


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Posted Oct 15th 2009 at 7:50 am in ACORN, Big Labor, Obama, Politics | 383 Comments