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    Critics Say Labor Board Favors Business
    By Steven Greenhouse
    The New York Times

    Friday 14 December 2007

    Senate and House Democrats attacked the Republican-led National Labor Relations Board at a Congressional hearing on Thursday, saying its recent decisions had favored employers over workers.

    The Democrats focused on 61 board decisions issued in September that, among other things, made it harder for unions to organize workers and harder for illegally fired employees to collect back pay.

    "This board has undermined collective bargaining at every turn, putting the power of the law behind lawbreakers, not law victims," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

    At the hearing, Wilma B. Liebman, a Democratic member of the five-member board, which oversees unionization rules for workers in private industry, repeatedly clashed with the board's Republican chairman, Robert J. Battista.

    "Virtually every recent policy choice by the board," Ms. Liebman said, "impedes collective bargaining, creates obstacles to union representation or favors employer interests."

    Mr. Battista, whose term expires Sunday, took strong issue with the Democrats' criticism.

    "Notwithstanding the special interest group rhetoric we may be hearing about the N.L.R.B., the agency is carrying out its statutory mission," said Mr. Battista, a labor lawyer from Detroit who represented many corporations.

    He said the labor board had significantly cut delays in handling unfair labor practice cases and had collected $110 million in back pay last year for workers who had been improperly retaliated against for union activity.

    The White House has remained mum on whether it will reappoint Mr. Battista. A senior Democratic Senate staff member said yesterday that Democratic senators were likely to resist confirming him.

    Republican leaders mocked the combined hearing by House and Senate members, saying it was improper to summon members of an adjudicatory panel before Congress to defend their decisions. The Republicans asserted that the hearing was reward to organized labor for helping Democrats in their campaigns.

    Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, the ranking Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, said, "Today's hearing is a transparent attempt by Democratic leaders to appease the labor union special interests that helped put them in office by attacking decisions of the N.L.R.B. that they do not view as sufficiently pro-union."

    Labor leaders are pressing the Democratic presidential candidates and Congressional Democrats to back legislation that would make it far easier for workers to unionize.

    In the decision that came under fiercest attack yesterday, the labor board ruled 3 to 2 in September that when a company agrees to grant union recognition after a majority of workers sign cards or a petition saying they want one, an election must be held - in effect vacating the union recognition - if 30 percent of the workers sign another petition within 45 days saying they want a vote to get rid of the union.

    Ms. Liebman and the Democratic legislators said that the decision showed an anti-union tilt and that it gave 30 percent of the workers the power to overrule majority sentiment. Mr. Battista defended the ruling, saying it merely gave workers the chance to vote in a secret ballot election on whether they wanted to keep the union.

    Several Democrats accused the board's majority of hypocrisy because on the same day it decided this case it issued another ruling that allowed a company to cut off recognition of its union after a majority of workers submitted a petition seeking a vote to get rid of it. The Democrats asked why the labor board did not insist on a secret ballot election under such circumstances.

    The union movement's discontent with the labor board has grown so intense that several hundred union sympathizers demonstrated in front of the board's Washington headquarters last month, chanting that it should be "shut down for renovations."

    Labor leaders say they would be happy if the board did nothing until a Democrat was in the White House. In addition to the expiration of Mr. Battista's term Sunday, the appointments of two other members end later this month when the Congressional session ends.

    An aide to the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said the senator was considering holding pro forma sessions of the Senate to prevent President Bush from renaming Mr. Battista as a recess appointment.

    At Thursday's hearing, a hotel housekeeper, Feliza Ryland, testified about her fight to win back pay after the board ruled in 2001 that she and 43 other workers had been illegally fired in 1996 in a labor dispute with Grosvenor Resorts in Orlando, Fla.

    "It has now been more than 11 years since I was unlawfully fired," Ms. Ryland said, "and I am still waiting to see the back pay, still waiting to see justice."

    In a decision in September, the board sharply reduced the workers' back pay, saying they forfeited the right to full back pay because they picketed for several weeks in an effort to get their jobs back instead of looking for new jobs. The board's majority wrote that giving full back pay would "reward idleness."