LAWMAKERS, BUSH NLRB CHIEF
JOUST OVER AGENCY’S RECORD

Pro-union lawmakers and the Bush-named chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, Robert J. Battista, clashed sharply on Dec. 13 over the agency’s record of anti-worker rulings.

In a sometimes-contentious joint hearing of the House and Senate labor subcommittees, Battista, a management-side labor lawyer from Detroit whose 5-year term at the agency’s helm ends in three days, defended his tenure by citing statistics of cases solved and declining times for everything from scheduling union representation elections to deciding labor law-breaking--formally called unfair labor practices--charges.

But union and other witnesses told lawmakers the problem with Battista’s constant 3-2 party-line rulings at the NLRB is a pattern and practice of quickly deciding cases against workers.

Among the rulings they hit are NLRB decisions that threw millions of workers out from under the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act--mostly by renaming them “supervisors”--curbed their rights to strike and to back pay, ordered employers to post notices telling workers they have the right to oust unions, and opened the way to quicker ouster of unions through so-called decertification elections.

Meanwhile, as UNITE HERE resort worker Feliza Ryland from Florida testified, she’s been waiting for her back pay for an illegal firing since 1998--and Battista’s board reduced it from $10,000 to around $2.400. At that, she said, she’s better off than one fired colleague. He “went back to work too quickly” at another job “and earned too much.” Battista’s board ruled he’ll get “not a penny of back pay,” Ryland told lawmakers.

The hearing was called in the wake of the Bush-named majority’s rulings in 61 cases in September, at the end of the last fiscal year. Virtually all were anti-worker and many overturned long-established precedents.

The results were so bad that the AFL-CIO formally complained about the Bush NLRB to the International Labour Organization--and marshaled thousands of unionists in 26 cities nationwide to march in mid-November demanding the board be shut down.

House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), and hearing chairman Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) and other Democrats sympathized with Ryland, sharply quizzed Battista and demanded that he justify the pattern of decisions.

Battista kept saying the board is neutral--but also said basic U.S. labor law is not really the 1935 NLRA, which promoted collective bargaining as a national objective to improve industrial relations, but the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. A GOP Congress passed Taft-Hartley over heavy union opposition and Democratic President Truman’s veto.

“Rights belong only to employees, unionized or not. The law is neutral and so is this agency,” Battista claimed--a statement the other witnesses strongly disputed.

Led by Rep. Ron Kline (R-Minn.), Republicans called the Dec. 13 session “political theater,” and kept returning to the case numbers. They let management-side labor lawyer Charles Cohen, a GOP NLRB member during the Clinton administration, repeatedly defend secret-ballot representation elections and denounce card-check.

That was another flash point between Battista and the Democrats, as the chairman, who represented publishers during the bitter strike they forced on Detroit’s newspaper unions in the mid-90s, kept citing an old Supreme Court Gissel ruling upholding such votes as superior to card-check recognition of unions--while ignoring the pro-business tilt and management law-breaking during union pre-election campaigns.

AFL-CIO General Counsel Jonathan Hiatt, in his prepared remarks, laid out the long line of September cases that prompted workers to take to the streets. But he said they are part of a pattern stretching back all 5 years of Battista’s reign. “The cumulative effect” of the Battista-led majority’s rulings “is enormous,” Hiatt explained. “They characterize a huge pendulum swing” in which the NLRB is overturning long-established precedents while giving short shrift to workers’ complaints.

“Given Battista’s candid assertion the (National Labor Relations) act’s primary purpose is no longer to enhance collective bargaining, all this is not surprising. It’s time for Congress to change labor law,” Hiatt said. Since Congress hasn’t updated labor law since 1959, the board “stepped into the vacuum” with its rulings, he noted.

NLRB member Wilma Liebman, the top Democratic dissenter on the board, said the problem is not just in the pro-business pattern of the rulings but the weak NLRA itself. She endorsed strengthening it in ways that describe the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, designed to help balance the scales between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. But she did not name the bill.

“Recent decisions say employee rights must yield to employer interests. Em-ployee choice cannot really be free if there’s intimidation,” Liebman told Kennedy. The board is so bad, she added, that “unions have become disillusioned with the elections process” and turned to card check instead. Formally writing card-check into law is a key part of EFCA. “Whether they (unions) are right or wrong” about NLRB-run elections “doesn’t matter. The process doesn’t work and that’s the perception,” she said.