by Mike Hall, Jan 29, 2008

If it’s late on a Friday, look out for the Bush administration to take an action it hopes the public won’t notice. And so it was Friday, when President Bush renominated Robert Battista, the point man in Bush’s war on workers, to another term on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Battista’s five-year term expired in December.

The former NLRB chairman constantly voted against workers and their unions and in favor of management rights during his tenure. Last month, Battista told a joint Senate-House hearing he doesn’t believe the primary purpose of the National Labor Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining. (For a good look at the NLRB’s actions, check out the American Rights at Work’s blog, Eye on the NLRB.)

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says Bush’s action is a

blatant attempt to keep a Labor board with an unbalanced, anti-worker bias, and they would be poisonous to America’s working families.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, blasted the move.

It’s unbelievable that President Bush would renominate Mr. Battista to the board, after he led the most anti-worker, anti-labor, anti-union board in its history. America’s hard-working men and women deserve a board that will uphold their rights, not undermine them. With these nominations, the administration has again demonstrated its hostility to fairness and justice in the workplace.

Along with Battista, whom Bush says he wants to designate as NLRB chairman again, he nominated management attorney Gerard Morales and former NLRB member Dennis P. Walsh, who twice has served on the board beginning with a recess appointment in December 2000. Walsh represented unions while working for a law firm from 1989 to 1994.

The Bush NLRB in September issued a set of sweeping anti-worker decisions that put more power in management’s hands and buried many workplace freedoms. Last year, the board redefined the term “supervisor” to deny as many as 8 million workers the freedom to join unions.

In November, several thousands workers in more than 20 cities across the country marched to and rallied at NLRB offices, saying until a pro-worker labor board is appointed, the agency should be “closed for renovations.”

At the December hearing, witnesses said the NLRB’s Republican majority has made it harder for workers to join unions and bargain—while making it less costly for employers to break the law and fire workers who want a union.

 As AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt told the lawmakers:

Since its installation in 2002, the Bush administration’s Labor Board has embarked on a systematic and insidious effort to radically overhaul our federal labor law and its regulation of labor relations in the private sector. Its decisions are not merely a pendulum swing or a course correction at times characteristic of changes in political administrations. Rather, they evince a calculated effort to make fundamental changes to our nation’s labor law.

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