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02.28.2013 1

Supreme Court may decide if endangering patients is protected union activity

By Rick Manning — What would you say if a group of employees working the Alzheimer’s ward in a health care facility deliberately switched the name tags on patient’s doors making patient identification difficult and removed dietary instructions from the patient’s room, putting patients at risk?

Would it matter that these actions were deliberately taken as part of a labor dispute?

That is exactly what happened at HealthBridge, where SEIU members engaged in a deliberate campaign of sabotage against the company, targeting patient’s health in a “work action.”

HealthBridge for their part, refused to let the offending SEIU local that sanctioned the attack on their patient’s safety, back to work.

Pretty clear cut situation, and truth be told, each of the offenders should have been hauled off to jail for reckless endangerment.

But that isn’t what happens in Obama’s America 2013.

In Obama’s America, his National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) appointees ruled that HealthBridge had to take back the nearly 700 striking “workers.”

HealthBridge is now asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, with a request they have submitted to Justice Antonin Scalia.

But Obama’s NLRB rulings of the past 16 months are in trouble for a different reason.  The U.S. District Court of Appeals in the Noel Canning versus NLRB decision threw the NLRB’s ability to make decisions into question as they found that Obama had illegally bypassed the Senate confirmation process in putting three members on the Board in Jan. 2012.

This seemingly benign decision has massive ramifications for the NLRB and all of its rulings over the past year and a half due to a separate Supreme Court case known as New Process Steel.  In New Process Steel, the Supreme Court ruled that the NLRB needed to have a quorum of at least three out of five members in order to make any decisions or rulings.

If the Canning decision is upheld by the Supreme Court, then all of the NLRB decisions for the past year and a half will become null and void.

This is certainly good news for the patients at HealthBridge, who deserve quality care, rather than being endangered by union shenanigans.

This report was compiled with the assistance of website www.SEIUmonitor.com, which monitors malfeasance at the powerful union which has regularly met to set labor policy in the Obama White House.

Rick Manning is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government.

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