Ever since Obama was sworn in, obscure federal agencies have been churning out pro-labor, anti-worker rulemakings in an attempt to reverse declining unionization numbers. Indicative of this unionization through regulation strategy is the National Mediation Board’s (NMB) minority rule decision promulgated in 2009.

The NMB is a three-member board comprised of one Bush holdover and two Obama appointees—both of which are former union officials—tasked with overseeing union-employer relations in the transportation industry. The makeup of the board effectively gives the pro-union board members fiat to enact whatever policies or regulations they see fit. Unsurprisingly, the NMB’s first major decision was a move to facilitate unionization in the transportation industry.

Overturning seventy-five years of precedent and two Supreme Court rulings, the NMB ruled that a majority of voting members were required to certify a union, not a majority of all members of a workforce. For two years now, conservative activists and Members of Congress have written letters and introduced legislation attempting to annul this blatant federal overreach. These efforts have finally culminated in tangible legislation, Title IX of the FAA Reauthorization bill, which would overturn the NMB’s minority rule decision.

Barely making it out of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Democrats, at the behest of organized labor, offered an amendment to remove Title IX from the FAA reauthorization bill. Republicans managed to quash this amendment by the razor thin margin of 30-29, losing three Republicans in the process.

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Just keep voting until you get the desired results and we will change the rules along the way to help advance policy changes that could not pass through Congress.

This is the message the National Mediation Board (NMB) has transmitted on behalf of Team Obama to union bosses who lost ground in the private sector. Only 11.9 percent of all wage and salary workers, public and private, are union members, and the percentage of union members in the private sector is a mere 6.9 percent. Unions lost over 612,000 members in 2010, most of them in private sector unions.

Although they helped to elect a Democratic president and Democratic Congress in 2008, organized labor failed to secure its top legislative priorities. This would include replacing the secret ballot in unionization elections with a card check system and binding arbitration that would allow federal mediators to impose guidelines on business. The strategy now is to reshape public policy through unelected agencies that typically elude media scrutiny.

In 2009, the NMB radically reworked a long-standing workplace rule at the behest of the AFL-CIO that governed the way airline and railroad workers unionized. Prior to making the change, a majority of a company’s workforce was necessary to vote in favor of representation. But now that the rule has been modified only a majority of votes received as opposed to the majority of entire workforce is sufficient to force unionization on an entire company. This reverses 75 years of labor policy upheld under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Moreover, there is no realistic or attainable option for decertification meaning employees are permanently stuck with a union even if they no longer want it.

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Today, the national flight attendants’ union released its latest attack on Delta airlines, filing a lawsuit on behalf of a group of disgruntled former Northwest Airlines flight attendants now working for Delta after the two airlines merged. The Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) claims that the air giant did not include the former Northwest employees fully in its profit-sharing plan because they were unionized before the merger.

Of the charges, AFA President Veda Shook says, “Delta is punishing Northwest Flight Attendants for their long history of collective bargaining. Delta management’s actions are shameful and undemocratic.”

This frivolous lawsuit is only the latest AFA attack on Delta. After the merger with Northwest all Delta flight attendants – including those formerly unionized under Northwest – held an election to decide whether to join the union, and voted to remain non-unionized. The AFA immediately launched multiple election interference charges, which have not been found valid.

Apparently, the AFA only cares about preserving democracy when the election goes their way.

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