Undaunted by the constitutionally-questionable recess appointment of three members to Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board, union attorney and current NLRB chairman Mark Pearce declared in an Associated Press interview that he and his union comrades are continuing their assault on the 93% of private-sector employees who are union-free. In fact, if Obama’s union appointees have their way, all employees who are targeted for unionization will have their employers forced to turn over their home telephone number and e-mail addresses to unions.
Ever since the 1960s, when unions have targeted companies for unionization through a NLRB-supervised election, employers have been required to turn over the list of employee names and their home addresses. The NLRB, in turn, promptly gives the list of employee names and home addresses to the involved unions. This list, called an Excelsior List, gives union organizers the ability to conduct intrusive home visits prior to the NLRB election.
The requirement to furnish the employees’ names and addresses list is mandatory. In fact, the refusal by an employer to furnish the list (or providing a list with too many errors) would typically result in the NLRB’s automatic overturning of an election if a union were to lose. Again, this requirement has been the standard since the 1960s.
Now, however, the union appointees within the Obama NLRB want to expand the current Excelsior List requirement from the mere furnishing of names and addresses to also include furnishing employees’ home telephone numbers and their e-mail addresses to enable unions to perpetually propagandize employees.
Peter Schaumber appeared on FNC Your World with Neil Cavuto to discuss this troubling new development within the NLRB. Schaumber, himself a former NLRB chairman, joined Cavuto to discuss his great fear: that unions will use that information to harass people not in a union.
“I think it’s terrible. Workers have a right to be left alone,” Schaumber said. “They have a right not to be harassed during a union organizing campaign. If a worker has given his or her employer their home phone, their personal email address, their cell phone, it was in the expectation that it wasn’t going to be given to third parties but was going to be used by the employer for the purposes of what it was intended to be given for. And in most instances that’s to contact the employee under emergency situations.”
The depths the NLRB will go to disrupt free enterprise and the backing it gets from Obama is reprehensible and yet another example of this administration’s anti-business sentiment. God help us from four more years.