Tomorrow is a big day for Big Labor. Sen. Kennedy will trot out a handful of the unions’ handpicked witnesses to justify passage of the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act.
So, as Kennedy and his labor-backed colleagues on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions conduct their well-choreographed kabuki dance, we want to remind readers of a few of Big Labors’ biggest lies:
- Labor’s Lies: 25% of employers illegally fire a worked during organizing campaign.
Fact: Less than 2% of employers illegally fired an employee during an organizational drive according to data obtained from the National Labor Relations Board in 2005.
- Labor’s Lies: 31,358 employees received back pay because of illegal employer discrimination for activities legally protected under the National Labor Relations Act.
Fact: While the number itself is accurate, the way it is twisted to support the EFCA is anything but. In fact, according to our analysis of NLRB data, just 62 organizational campaigns saw an employee illegally fired. The vast majority of the 31,358 employees paid back pay had nothing to do with an organizational campaign. Instead, they were largely a result of contractual disagreements on overtime, break time, and other management-labor negotiations.
- Labor’s Lies: Unions have faced only 42 allegations of fraud or coercion since 1935.
Fact: According to our analysis of the NLRB’s CATS database, unions have faced literally thousands of allegations of coercion, harassment, violence, and assaults. Those 42 cases only refer to allegations considered by the Labor Board–which is the labor-law equivolent of the Supremem court. The vast majority of cases against unions are resovled without appealing to the Board itself, but rather through Administrative Law Judges or the NLRB’s regional offices.
