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04.29.2011 2

How an Unelected, Unconfirmed Obama Appointee is working to destroy the secret ballot

Craig Becker

By Rick Manning – It is somewhat odd that one of President Ronald Reagan’s most often used quotes “Personnel is policy”, isn’t particularly eloquent although its alliteration and brevity make it memorable. Perhaps the three word phrase is remembered because it is succinct and accurate, even more so today than even 25 years ago. In the past week, America has gotten a double dose reminder of why this axiom is true through dual National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) actions aimed at forcing unionization on the nation’s private sector.

In one action, the NLRB decided to sue the states of South Carolina and South Dakota because their voters had the audacity to protect their citizen’s right to a secret ballot vote in a union election.

Of course, this offended the sensibilities of the Obama appointees on the NLRB, who first threatened and now are moving forward with legal action against the citizens of these states.

The second NLRB action is all the more outrageous as they are seeking to keep Boeing Corporation from building airplanes in South Carolina rather than in Washington state. You see, Washington state is very friendly to the union that represents Boeing workers, and the workers in the Boeing plant in South Carolina recently decertified that very union. So, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers dialed up Washington, DC, and the NLRB came riding out to right the wrong of a company outrageously choosing to locate a manufacturing facility in the wrong state.

This brings us back to the Reagan quote, “personnel is policy.”

While Donald Trump has been running around Hawaii looking for Obama’s birth certificate, Obama’s unconfirmed appointee to the NLRB has been having his way in launching an official federal government jihad in support of Obama’s big labor supporters, who don’t care where he was born.

The brains behind the NLRB attack on the American way of life, is a formerly obscure lawyer named Craig Becker. Becker’s views are so extreme when it comes to management/labor relations, that his nomination was derailed by a bi-partisan vote in the Senate when it was controlled by 59 Democrats.

In response, President Obama, at the urging of the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka, used a backdoor mechanism to get Becker onto the NLRB called a recess appointment, which allows him to serve for a defined period of time without Senate confirmation.

Why was Becker so important that Obama was willing to risk the ire of the Senate to put him in place?

Craig Becker was a top lawyer at both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and their rival the AFL-CIO simultaneously.

Craig Becker was the intellectual architect behind Big Labor’s plan to coerce workers into membership against their will through denying them the right to a secret ballot election.

This rejected Obama nominee even went so far as to write in the 1998 Fall/Winter edition of the New Labor Forum, “At first blush is might seem fair to give workers the choice to remain unrepresented. But, in providing workers this US labor grants employers a powerful incentive.”

Is it any wonder that this unelected, unconfirmed Obama appointee has in the course of one week led an obscure government agency to put the force of the US government against Boeing Corporation creating American jobs in a state where those jobs are unlikely to become members of a labor union, and against the citizens of states who are attempting to protect their rights to a secret ballot.

Personnel is policy, and Craig Becker proves that a determined virtually anonymous zealot can do incalculable damage to the nation’s economy.

What is scary is that in this Administration, Craig Becker is not the outlier, but instead is the norm.

Rick Manning is the Communications Director of Americans for Limited Government. Also see his story on House legislation to prevent the NLRB from suing South Carolina and South Dakota.


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