Update: Senator Harkin justifies vote saying NLRB nomineee “cannot” change the rules
When it comes to whether NLRB nominee Craig Becker can “implement the Employee Free Choice Act by administrative fiat,” AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff says “yes”. Senator Harkin justified his pro-Becker vote yesterday by saying “no”. This comes directly from Senator Tom Harkin’s prepared statement at the HELP Committee Executive Session on Pending Nominations yesterday. Shout out to [more...]

Posted Fri, 05 Feb 2010 .

AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff: NLRB appointees can “change the rules”
Update: Senator Harkin justifies vote saying NLRB nomineee “cannot” change the rules As the Director of Organizing at the AFL-CIO, Stewart Acuff draws a smaller crowd than the SEIU’s Andy Stern or his boss at the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have something laughable to say. In his poorly timed Huffington Post [more...]

Posted Thu, 04 Feb 2010 .

Report: Union Math, Union Myths

Read the Full Report (.pdf, 88k)

Since its peak in the 1950s, union membership in the private sector has steadily dropped. To explain the decline, labor leaders have scapegoated businesses for intimidating employees during organizing campaigns. To justify the claim, they cite statistics from union-affiliated researchers which suggest that a significant number of employees are fired in the organizing process. But data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) do not—in any way—substantiate the notion that tens of thousands of employees are wrongly fired each year.

By logically linking organizing campaigns with Unfair Labor Practices, we determined that only 2.7 percent of union organizing campaigns feature an employee illegally fired (and offered reinstatement, typically with back pay). Furthermore, we demonstrate that other research on the subject relies on outdated assumptions that do not represent current NLRB data on the issue.