well, fuck

Steve Greenhouse article on the right-wing agenda of bush's NLRB

"All the cases that we've decided have been well reasoned,"

Mr. Battista said. "They're certainly consistent with the act. I wouldn't

characterize them as pro-business or pro-union. I'd like to say they're

pro-employee."

Vin Petrini couldn't have said it better!

The board's defenders say it is merely continuing a long tradition

of swinging back and forth: toward management when a Republican is in the White

House and toward labor during Democratic presidencies.

"After eight years of

a liberal Clinton board and an extremely liberal general counsel, there is of

course going to be some turning back toward a conservative agenda," said Randel

Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the

United States Chamber of Commerce. "The board has turned a corner here, but it's

not a wholesale reversal of the case law in favor of the business

community."

Several recent board decisions, Mr. Johnson pointed out, have

reversed Clinton-era rulings that overturned precedents set by Republican

boards. In a case involving I.B.M., the board voted 3 to 2 to overturn a Clinton

board ruling that gave nonunion workers the right to have a colleague accompany

them to investigative or disciplinary meetings with supervisors. The Clinton-era

ruling was a reversal of a 1980's decision.

In a case involving Brown

University, the board reversed a Clinton-era ruling involving New York

University - a reversal of a 1970's decision - that gave graduate student

teaching assistants the right to unionize.

Mr. Battista said, "What we did

restores the precedent that has been time-honored and had never been overturned

by a court or by Congressional action."

The bush administration: slowly turning the clock back on workers' rights to the 1800s, one dceade at a time, and damn proud of it.

But the board's Democratic members vigorously objected. "The

issues raised by the petitioners were settled 40 years ago," they wrote. "To

revisit it serves no purpose but to undermine a principle that has been endorsed

time and again by the board and the courts."

***

Charles Craver, a professor of labor law at George Washington

University, said the board's conservative tilt would hurt unions, but less so

than the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, which he said was

increasingly unfriendly to labor.

"I think we have a labor board as

conservative as any time since the Reagan board," Professor Craver said. "It

really troubles me because we're revisiting a lot of cases that have been fairly

well settled."

Wait - what happened to the Bush Administration's crusade against an activist judiciary which throws out precedent in favor of politics? Oh wait, "reality based-community." I remember now. How silly of me.