Sept. 20, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government (ALG) today releaseda poll conducted by the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend showing 64 percent of registered voters favor candidates that support removing the quasi-judicial powers from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
“The results show that the more voters find out about the NLRB, and its powers to act as prosecutor, judge and jury against private companies at the behest of big labor, the more they oppose it,” ALG President Bill Wilson said.
Substantial majorities believe that the agency, founded in 1935, is antiquated (62 percent), has too much power “to officiate legal proceedings over private U.S. companies in its own court system” (66 percent) and to play “the roles of investigator, prosecutor, and judge in each of the cases that come before it” (63 percent), and opposed the Board’s “power to dictate where, that is in which states, companies can locate their places of work or production facilities” (72 percent).
The NLRB has come under increasing scrutiny due to its decision barring Boeing from setting up a manufacturing facility in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, but Wilson said the agency’s history of abuses went back to its inception.
Those include the controversial NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (1939) decision that a company could not fire workers that staged sit-down strikes, and the BE & K Construction Co. v. NLRB (2002) decision that a company could not sue a union that was attempting to organize its employees, as noted in a recent Investor’s Business Daily oped by Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA).
Both decisions had to be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Rep. Scott is expected to unveil legislation today that will rein in the agency’s quasi-judicial powers, a bill that Wilson called “the most comprehensive effort in 75 years to rein in the one-sided decisions of an agency singularly designed to issue rulings in favor of labor unions.”
Attachments:
the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend poll on behalf of Americans for Limited Government regarding National Labor Relations Board, Aug. 19-23, 2011 at www.getliberty.org/files/NLRBPoll8-19to8-23-11.pdf.
Interview Availability: Please contact Rebekah Rast at (703) 383-0880 or at rrast@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.
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