Jim Hightower

The Bush regime is so hostile to the rights of labor that Bush’s own National Labor Relations Board is refusing to obey our nation’s labor laws.

The NLRB –the agency responsible for protecting employee rights – is flagrantly violating the bargaining rights of its own employees. Here’s the story: In 2005, NLRB employees petitioned an administrative law authority for the right to organize themselves into a union bargaining unit within the labor agency. NLRB officials opposed this, but the authority ruled in favor of the employees.

Having jumped through all the legal hoops and been certified, the union set out to bargain with NLRB management – but the labor agency’s top officials refused! The union went back to the authority, which investigated the situation and has now ruled that the NLRB is in violation of federal law. That should have been that, but Bush’s hand-picked head of the labor rights agency, Ronald Meisburg, said to hell with labor rights. He is contemptuously refusing to bargain with the employees.

Meisburg is pulling a stall tactic that corporate violators routinely use, hoping to outlast the unionizing effort. By defying the ruling, he is forcing the issue into federal courts – a process that he smugly estimates will delay any bargaining past the expiration of his term in 2010.

Will it surprise you to learn that the guy Bush chose to protect the rights of workers from corporate abuse has spent most of his career in service to corporate employers that seek to undermine workers rights? Corporate bias is one thing, but this is lawlessness! By blatantly violating the rights of NLRB employees, Meisburg is signaling to all employers that contempt of labor laws is OK – go ahead and stiff workers with impunity.

When the law enforcer becomes the law breaker, he’s not fit for the job. To demand Meisburg’s ouster, call the senate labor committee: 202-224-5375