Last week, AFL-CIO blogger Tula Connell penned a screed on TomPaine.com, suggesting that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) told Capitol Hill staffers that our study on illegal firings during organizing campaigns could not be substantiated. She wrote:

Both Republican and Democratic Senate staff requested clarification on the group’s claims from the NLRB. Staff at the NLRB swiftly responded to report [CUF’s] data cannot be substantiated.

Let’s get some facts straight. There was never any “CUF data”; everything we relied on came directly from the NLRB. And while the NLRB did suggest that some of their data was unreliable for analysis, they made no mention of the Center for Union Facts research on the subject. NLRB Associate General Council Richard Siegel explained the problem with the Board’s database in his letter to the Hill:

While the data entry screens for unfair labor practice case tracking do contain a field to be selected by our personnel when an unfair labor practice case arises in the course of an organizing campaign, that field has not been utilized routinely because the data was not necessary for case processing. Therefore, that data in CATS is unreliable.

But you won’t hear that out of the AFL-CIO’s vitriolic mouthpiece. We’ll stick to the facts.