Obama’s Labor Appointments Are Long Overdue
By René Lara, Political and Legislative Director of the Texas AFL-CIO
President Barack Obama recently appointed three nominees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the government agency that is supposed to protect workers who want to form a union in order to negotiate a contract with their employer. For years that agency has been rendered powerless by laws that allow employers to scare employees into voting against forming a union.
For the past several years, a group of Republican senators have been blocking every one of President Barack Obama’s major initiatives and many of his appointments, including those to the NRLB. They could do this through their power to filibuster as long as they had 41 votes to block a measure or an appointment. In fact, senators used the same rules to block major civil rights laws many years ago. Speaking through his actions, President Obama just said, “¡Ya basta!”
The business community and their U.S. Senate allies have loved to hate the NLRB, since its establishment in 1934, because it also investigates unfair labor practices. During the Obama administration, employers and their Senate friends did not want friendlier appointments to the consumer agency and the NLRB. What they wanted was for that agency not to operate — period. This is how they were blocking the President’s appointments: the Constitution allows the president to appoint persons to posts while the Congress is in recess. When the senators were out of town, they simply acted like they were still working by having a few senators gavel them into session, sometimes just for a few minutes.
The President has just challenged and bypassed that Senate procedure, thereby rocking the balance-of-power boat in our nation’s government.
Decisionmakers ought to take a longer-term view of labor unions. As the influence of the NLRB and labor grew after the 1930s, workers’ wages went up and unions created pension funds that provided capital for businesses to invest. It is no coincidence that the power and influence of the United States grew as its citizenry became prosperous — in the last century.
El Presidente just landed a hard upper-cut on some powerful Republican senators. He did so on behalf of workers — that means you and me.
Expect those senators to be un poco enojados.
René Lara of El Paso is the Political and Legislative Director of the Texas AFL-CIO, a state federation of labor unions representing 220,000 working people and their families at the Texas state capitol.
