Most Americans have heard of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) through its ill-conceived scheme to prevent Boeing from building a new plant in South Carolina because the Palmetto State has a right-to-work law. The board’s actions have created a huge backlash against the Obama Administration and its pro-Big Labor policies.

But how much do most Americans know about Obama’s other labor board?

Most Americans haven’t heard of President Obama’s other labor board, the National Mediation Board (NMB). This board is specifically focused on labor relations between the railroad and airline industries. And just like the NLRB, the NMB is aggressively pushing Big Labor’s agenda.

Last July, the NMB overturned nearly a century of precedent and issued a new pro-union rule regarding union elections. Instead of requiring the traditional democratic practice of a simple majority of members to unionize, now the rules only require a majority of votes cast for unionization.

If a company has 2,000 workers and only 400 people vote but 201 of them are pro-union, the entire workforce of 2,000 people are forced to unionize. Couple that with the fact that it is nearly impossible to decertify a union, and those 201 votes in effect mandate unionization for good. (more…)

BigGovernment.com founder Andrew Breitbart received another taste of SEIU thuggery this past week at “Occupy L.A.,” his second public run-in with the SEIU thugs.  Mr. Breitbart’s first exposure was memorialized in Unholy Alliance?, The Devil at Breitbart’s Doorstep and SEIU’s Unholy Alliance. In that experience, Mr. Breitbart and Mr. Glenn Beck were confronted by, Reverend C.J. Hawkins, one of the multitude of characters that attacked EMS during the SEIU’s corporate campaign to force the unionization of my business, EMS, as chronicled inThe Devil at My Doorstep. It is obvious that the SEIU is willing to attack anyone or any entity to achieve its goals, using intimidation as its calling card!

In the latest incident, a union thug followed Mr. Breitbart throughout the “Occupy L.A.”event in an obvious attempt to intimidate him (see SEIU Thug Follows Andrew Breitbart Around at Occupy L.A. and Andrew Breitbart Hits Occupy L.A. Protest, Brings Eric Bolling the Video Evidence). This act of outright intimidation is similar to what I experienced during the SEIU’s corporate campaign against EMS, when two SEIU thugs fell in shoulder to shoulder with me for two blocks in downtown Indianapolis (see blog Corporate Campaigns: Vehicle to Forced Unionism and Political Payback).

It appears the SEIU is ramping up a corporate campaign against Mr. Breitbart. In this instance, the goal is not to force unionization his employees but rather to silence him much as they have done with their own members, small and large businesses, banks, government officials, and the mainstream media. See SEIU Thugs Beat Up State Worker Ken Hamidi in Sacramento,  A Story of Our Future(use of a corporate campaign against small business), California Hospital Alleges SEIU Extortion (use of a corporate campaign against large business), A Smear Campaign (use of a corporate campaign against a city council president), SEIU Plan to Destroy JP Morgan (a plan for the use of corporate campaign against banks) and many mainstream media sources, including Fox News as seen in the SEIU’s website post Glenn Beck and Republican Violence (the use of corporate campaigns against Glenn Beck). (more…)

Now we know why unionists were fighting so hard for a federal “card check” law.  Organizers can unionize private and public employees, forcing them to pay hundreds in union dues, before they even know anything about it.

That’s the situation at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans, Massachusetts.

Last week news broke that the reputable charter school was the second in Massachusetts to be organized by the American Federation of Teachers.

Various sources indicated that the unionization effort was somewhat less than forthright. Several teachers complained that they were never informed about the process and were never asked to vote on the issue.

“The union effort was coordinated by group of teachers and staff that did not include all employees,” one teacher wrote. “In fact, a number of employees were not approached at all and found out, quite by accident, that a union had been formed without our input.

“A full vote of the faculty and staff was never taken and plans to unionize went ahead, anyway.”

Unionization without a vote of the staff? That sounds like the nasty little practice of “card check,” which allows pro-union employees to gang up on co-workers and pressure them to sign a union membership card. Once 50 percent of them do so, the union is automatically certified.

There are no private ballots involved in the process. Those who refuse to sign are exposed to all the pressure and intimidation that the union can muster. Under those conditions, it probably doesn’t take very long to gain 50 percent approval.

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The Service Employees International Union has demonstrated a history of blatant “pay-to-play” political tactics. And “pay-to-play” is probably why the SEIU has been at the forefront of promoting ObamaCare, with a “robust” public option.

In 2002, the union spent well over $1 million and worked tirelessly getting Rod Blagojevich elected governor of Illinois.  Shortly after he was sworn in, he signed an executive order, allowing SEIU to unionize 20,000 state health care employees.  It was the first such move by any governor on SEIU’s behalf.  Dozens of campaign contributions from the SEIU to Blogojevich are compiled in a list posted on shopfloor.org, a blog maintained by the National Association of Manufacturers.

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From the National Union of Healthcare Workers:

Today’s Wall Street Journal and Fresno Bee report that SEIU engaged in illegal threats, ballot-tampering, and other serious violations of election rules during a June union election for 10,000 homecare providers in Fresno, according to voters and union staff who worked for SEIU during the election and have now come forward.

A sworn declaration from an SEIU whistleblower says that senior SEIU officials instructed organizers to violate election rules during the mail-in, secret-ballot vote, and then destroyed evidence of the violations. Statements from two former SEIU staff and several homecare providers were recently submitted to the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) as evidence accompanying a request to overturn the election results.

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You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s-and more than twice as expensive.

So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That’s horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight.

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