http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/08/american-labour-lawsWITH America's unemployment rate topping 9%, not many people would ask to be put out of a job. Yet that is more or less what Wilma Liebman did last weekend. At midnight on August 27th Ms Liebman's third term on the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) came to an end. She asked not to be reappointed, and left the NLRB after serving for 14 years, longer than all but two previous NLRB members, and as the board's chair since 2009.
The NLRB enforces America's National Labour Relations Act, a New Deal-era law that governs private-sector unionisation and collective bargaining. The president appoints its members, so its tenor tends to shift with the White House's occupant: Republican presidents appoint more management-friendly board members, while Democrats appoint labour supporters (before coming to the board Ms Liebman counselled two large unions, and her replacement as chair, Mark Pearce, practised union-side labour law at his own firm in Buffalo).
So it is hardly surprising that congressional Republicans did not much care for the NLRB under Ms Liebman's stewardship. That did not stop her from being taken aback at how she was received on Capitol Hill: as she explained in an exit interview with the New York Times, "We knew we were going to have a boxing match, but we didn't expect our opponents to come in with a baseball bat."
A few cases in particular have drawn Republican ire: the complaint filed by the NLRB's acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, against Boeing (which we wrote about here and here); the board's proposal to speed up unionisation elections; and a recent decision to take away workers' rights to petition for a secret ballot to end union recognition in workplaces where the union had become recognised after a " card-check" sign-up campaign—thereby reversing a ruling the board had made in 2007.
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