Beware Ambush Elections
The U.S. Senate HELP Committee recently contacted me about my experience with labor elections and my insight about how this ruling would harm businesses and employees across the country. This week, the points expressed in my original blog and documented in The Devil at Our Doorstep will be debated and voted upon, as reported in recent headlines “Republican-Controlled Congress to Vote to Repeal NLRB Rule.” Additionally, in a show of support the US Chamber Asks Judge To Nix NLRB’s Election Rule. Hopefully, Senate Democrats will stand behind movement, recognize the injustice, and provide enough votes to override an expected Presidential veto.
Employees and employers across the country need to be wary of the forced union ambush being promulgated by President Obama and his big labor “Gasping Dinosaurs” and the radicals the President has appointed at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The President is utilizing Rule by Fiat to fundamentally transform America as he promised when he was first elected, while also paying back his political supporters.
“NLRB Flexes Muscles” was definitely the theme this past week as the NLRB published its final rule making on “ambush elections,” and effectively reduced election periods from 41 to 21 days or potentially less (see Ambush,NLRB boosts unions’ organizing leverage, Elections, NLRB Issues its Ambush Election Rule, NLRB Representation Case Procedures Fact Sheet, Quickie Gifts to Big Labor, and NAM CEO Speaks Out ON NLRB Ruling). Even more damaging to both employees’ and employers’ rights and privacy is the fact that, in its rule making, the NLRB stated that employers must provide the names, e-mail addresses, home addresses and phone numbers of its employees to facilitate the “Quickie Elections.“ As described in The Devil at Our Doorstep, the current 41 day pre-election period is necessary, as employees are often coerced, intimidated and lied to by the organizers representing the labor unions. Often they are misled to believe that once they sign a union election card they must vote for the union when they go to the polls! While absolutely false, such conduct has been well established by the NLRB to be completely acceptable.
Unless the employer’s management team is well-versed on labor law and well-prepared to contradict these misrepresentations, their employees would never know the truth. The Quickie Elections rule making makes it virtually impossible for an employer to have the opportunity to refute the union’s misinformation and propaganda, particularly if the employer has not been faced with such organizing efforts in the past. In my own experience, if I would not have had the opportunity to meet and speak with our employees on several occasions — which would not be possible under the new ruling — they would have gone to the polls believing they had to vote for the union, despite the fact they had been intimidated into signing election cards.
As if that wasn’t enough, the NLRB boosts unions’ organizing leverage by allowing employees and union organizers access to employers e-mail systems so they can coerce, misinform, intimidate and misrepresent the truth about what is transpiring, and ignore big labor’s true goal, that It’s All About the Dues Money. In effect, what is happening is a rapid move towards “Card Check,” effectively allowing a union to force unionize an employer’s workforce behind the scenes virtually overnight.
These Quickie Gifts to Big Labor by the NLRB are A Death Penalty for Employees and Employers! They provide labor organizers great leverage to force employers to sign a Neutrality Agreement. This agreement is big labor’s current means of eliminating the secret ballot election by utilizing Death by a Thousand Cuts corporate campaigns to intimidate employers into signing it and achieving Card Check.
These actions are nothing more than political pay back by this Administration to the big labor bosses at the expense of the American people and the American economy.
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David A. Bego is the President and CEO of EMS, an industry leader in the field of environmental workplace maintenance, employing nearly 5000 workers in thirty-three states. Bego is the author of “The Devil at My Doorstep,” as well as the just released sequel, “The Devil at Our Doorstep,” based on his experiences fighting back against one of the most powerful unions in existence today.