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.
Radical Labor Board Gets Rubber-Stamped
Credit: Senate Democratics/ Wikimedia Commons 
Credit: Delta New Hub/Wikimedia Commons
Key Senators Put Joe Biden’s Demands Over Constituents’ Pleas
On July 28, every Democrat member of the U.S. Senate, plus a handful of Big Labor-intimidated Republicans, bowed to the demands of top union bosses and the White House by rubber-stamping President Joe Biden’s two pending nominations for the five-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). One of the Biden NLRB nominees getting the Senate nod is David Prouty. Until his confirmation he was the top lawyer for Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 32-BJ, which has a long history of corruption and political activism in the Big Apple.
The other is Gwynne Wilcox, a radical union lawyer who most recently was associate general counsel for another large, New York City-based SEIU subsidiary, Local 1199.
Local 1199 officers and militants have been implicated in multiple alleged acts of sabotage in nursing home facilities.
Big Labor Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) surprised many Beltway observers by ramming through both Biden NLRB nominees weeks before the seat to be filled by one of them, Mr. Prouty, had even opened up.
Mr. Prouty is expected to be installed in late August, shortly after this Newsletter edition goes out in the mail.
Union Bosses Desperate to Undo Trump NLRB’s Modest Pro-Employee Reforms
Activist supporters of expanding union bosses’ monopoly power over American employees will then hold a majority of NLRB seats for the first time since September 2017, when Trump nominee William Emanuel was seated on the board.
National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix commented:
“Powerful union officials and politicians who depend on their forced dues-fueled political support to get elected and reelected were desperate to regain control over the NLRB, which calls the shots on labor-management relations in more than 90% of America’s private-sector workplaces.
“One reason why is that, on a number of important occasions, the Trump NLRB did something that is historically rare at this agency: It insisted that union bosses and employers alike respect limited, but important, statutory rights afforded to employees who don’t want a union.
“Union bigwigs and their puppet politicians wanted a Biden NLRB installed as fast as possible so the Trump board’s modest reforms could be undone before too many independent-minded workers were able to take advantage of them.”
Right to Work-Backed Reform Is Helping Workers Oust Unwanted Unions
As an example of a reform Big Labor wants junked without delay, Mr. Mix cited the Trump board’s 2020 rule change, made after receiving ample input from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys, with regards to so-called “blocking charges.”
For decades, bureaucratic rules made it easy for Big Labor lawyers to block workers from exercising their statutory right to vote out a union they don’t want by filing NLRB charges against the employer that, regardless of their merits, had no impact on employees’ desire for union “decertification.”
“Thanks to the revised rules for which Foundation attorneys pushed, decertification elections are proceeding more quickly and the results are being announced sooner,” explained Mr. Mix, who heads the Foundation as well as the Committee.
After Union Lawyers Failed To Block Vote, Medical Workers Voted Them Out
A case in point is the NLRB-supervised election that occurred on July 7 and 8 at the Desert Springs Hospital Medical Center in Las Vegas.
After dozens of the hospital’s technical employees petitioned for an election to remove SEIU bosses from their workplace, union lawyers first tried to block the vote, citing current and past NLRB charges they had filed against the employer.
Under current NLRB rules, such tactics aren’t viable any more. Workers’ 39-13 vote to oust SEIU officials was certified on July 20.
But now that the Senate has confirmed David Prouty and Gwynne Wilcox to the NLRB, Big Labor has every reason to expect they will do everything they can to hinder workers across the country from exercising their statutory right to be union-free.
After all, the SEIU subsidiaries Mr. Prouty and Ms. Wilcox worked for until this summer are both aggressively lobbying for passage of the so-called “PRO” Act (H.R.842/S.420), a package of new special privileges for union bosses whose core provision would authorize forced union fees as a job condition in all 50 states.
This scheme would thus render meaningless the 27 state Right to Work laws that are now on the books!
And the fact that Mr. Prouty has chosen to serve for years the bosses of a union local that was once ordered by a court to fork over a $100,000 civil penalty for hiring detectives to spy on a dissident member and his wife suggests that he is perhaps even more contemptuous of workers’ rights than is Ms. Wilcox.
Several Senators Could Pay a Steep Political Price For Their Votes
With a Big Labor Democrat yes-man like Charles Schumer running the Senate, and union boss-appeasing Republicans like Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) clearly uninterested in putting up a fight, stopping the Prouty and Wilcox nominations was always going to be an uphill battle.
“Despite the long odds, this is a battle that National Right to Work Committee members and supporters had to fight,” said Mr. Mix.
As floor action on Joe Biden’s pro-forced unionism NLRB picks approached, freedom-loving citizens nationwide were mobilized by email to contact their senators.
In response, National Right to Work Committee members and supporters petitioned their senators to demand that Mr. Prouty and Ms. Wilcox pledge publicly to defend “legal protections for workers who oppose unionization” vigorously as a condition of confirmation.
“Before the floor votes on these nominations, all senators, especially senators who must run to keep their seats in 2022 and face potentially close reelection races, understood that their pro-Right to Work constituents knew how much was at stake,” said Mr. Mix.
“Senators who represent strongly pro-Right to Work states, but put President Joe Biden’s demands over their freedom-loving constituents’ pleas, may pay a steep political price.
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. You can go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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