Tyranny Triumphs in the Great Lakes State
Ignoring ample evidence of forced unionism’s unfairness and its damaging impact on jobs and incomes, Big Labor Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed Right to Work destruction in 2023.
Obama NLRB Pro-Big Labor Boss Board Finally Pearced
Forced-Unionism Extremist Finally Off the NLRB
President Trump Requested Not to Renominate Obama Holdover
National Right to Work Committee activists and their allies across the country scored an important victory on January 3, when the nomination of radical union lawyer Mark Pearce for another five-year term on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) expired in the U.S. Senate with the conclusion of the 115th Congress.
Over the course of the nearly eight-and-a-half years he occupied a seat on the powerful, five-member NLRB, Mr. Pearce again and again banded together with former President Barack Obama’s other handpicked appointees to execute a series of bureaucratic power grabs.
Each of these power grabs was clearly designed to help union officials seize monopoly-bargaining privileges over and extract forced dues and fees from as many workers as possible.
One especially outrageous example of Mr. Pearce’s unwillingness to hold Big Labor accountable for violating federal labor statutes is the 2016 opinion he coauthored, with one other Obama appointee, in UNITE HERE Local 5.
In 2013, the bosses of the Local 5 subsidiary of the AFL-CIO-affiliated UNITE HERE union sent menacing letters to four independent-minded employees of the Hyatt Regency Waikiki Resort and Spa in Honolulu.
Federal Court Panel: Pearce-Coauthored 2016 Ruling Is ‘Legally Unsupportable’
The letters to employees Mark Tamosiunas, Steven Taono, Agnes Demarke, and Wayne Young included threats flagrantly violating their right under federal labor law not to bankroll union-boss politics and lobbying with their forced union fees.
At the time they received the UNITE HERE letters, which threatened to have their wages garnished if they refused to pay forced fees for Local 5’s bargaining and political schemes, equal in amount to the dues forked over by members, none of these employees belonged to the union.
In forced-unionism states like Hawaii, private-sector workers can unfortunately be forced to pay fees to a union they would never voluntarily join, or be fired, but the law does not permit Organized Labor chiefs to force workers to pay for union advocacy about non-workplace matters.
With the help of staff attorneys for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (the Committee’s sister organization), in early 2014 the four Hyatt Regency employees filed unfair labor practice charges against the Local 5 brass with the NLRB.
Two years later, Mr. Pearce was part of a board majority claiming that Local 5 bigwigs’ political forced-fee threat to have workers’ wages garnished if they didn’t obey was lawful.
Fortunately, thanks to Right to Work attorneys’ free assistance, the employees were able to file an appeal in federal court to get the Obama NLRB’s lawless decision overturned.
Just last June, a panel of judges agreed that the board’s bureaucrats had egregiously erred.
The panel, consisting of two Obama-appointed judges and a Jimmy Carter appointee, denounced the Pearce-coauthored ruling as “legally unsupportable,” “contorted,” “provid[ing] no rational basis,” and “mak[ing] no sense” when they remanded the case for entry of a remedial order in favor of the injured employees.
President Trump Can Make Sure Mark Pearce Won’t Inflict Even More Harm
“The outrageous decision Mark Pearce helped concoct in UNITE HERE Local 5 is just one of many instances in which he and his cohorts helped union bosses get away for years with illegally extracting forced dues and fees from dissenting workers,” said Committee Vice President Greg Mourad.
“And it will take additional years of legal action by tenacious employees and Right to Work attorneys before the damage wrought by the Obama NLRB is undone, to the extent it can be.
“Last year, after Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer [D-N.Y.] smooth-talked the White House into nominating Mr. Pearce for another NLRB term, an intense Committee citizen mobilization campaign helped sway Majority Leader Mitch McConnell [R-Ky.] to refuse to bring the nomination up for a vote.”
Early this year, Committee President Mark Mix wrote Mr. Trump to ask him to prevent Mr. Pearce from inflicting any more harm by keeping him off the NLRB.
If he is renominated, promised Mr. Mix, Committee members will do all they can to stop him from being confirmed in the Senate.
