It seems that Friday afternoons are always the time to drop job-killing news on America’s job creators. In this case, the union appointees within Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board have issued a press release stating they will be issuing their final rule on ambush elections on November 30th.
In mid-June, the union-controlled NLRB issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making on the procedures governing NLRB-conducted elections. Despite the fact that unions already win more than 60% of all secret-ballot elections and the median time frame between a union petition for and election and the election itself is 38 days, the proposed rule change would like shorten that time drastically, creating an “ambush” union campaign on targeted employers and employees.
When the NLRB’s union appointees issued the notice, it was met with a tremendous outcry from America’s employers, as well as the sole GOP member at the NLRB.
The board’s lone Republican, Brian Hayes, issued a vigorous dissent, saying the proposal would result in the type of “quickie elections” union leaders have long sought. Hayes claimed elections could be held in as little as 10 to 21 days from the filing of a petition, giving employers less of a chance to make their case.
“Make no mistake, the principal purpose for this radical manipulation of our election process is to minimize or, rather, to effectively eviscerate an employer’s legitimate opportunity to express its views about collective bargaining,” Hayes wrote.
On Friday afternoon, with controversial SEIU lawyer Craig Becker’s recess appointment to the NLRB ending at the end of the year (rendering the NLRB unable to issue the rule change), the NLRB’s press release stated that the Board would be issuing its decision on November 30th.
The National Labor Relations Board has scheduled a Nov. 30 vote on whether to adopt a small number of the amendments to its election procedures that the Board proposed earlier this year.
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The Board received more than 65,000 written comments on the proposal and heard testimony from 66 speakers at a two-day hearing in July. In response to those comments, and in light of the possibility that the Board will lose a quorum at the end of the current congressional session, Board Chairman Mark Pearce will propose issuing a final rule limited to several provisions designed to reduce unnecessary litigation.
