http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/14672/Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 02/28/09 11:30
Wilma Liebman
For years, as a member of the National labor Relations Board, she spoke out against the Bush-appointed majority on that board. For years she felt frustration over how, in ruling after ruling, that board interpreted key parts of the National Labor relations Act in ways that hurt workers. Now, after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, she has become the chairman of that board.
Wilma Liebman says she looks forward to a future where workers’ rights, and how to insure them, are once again at the top of the national agenda.
The NLRB was created under the National labor Relations Act, itself a key part of FDR’s New Deal. The original purpose of the act was to help build the foundations for mass prosperity by reigning in the out-of-control business practices that had caused the Great Depression in the first place. Other legal building blocks in the New Deal were the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established minimum wage and overtime pay guidelines, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which regulated public utilities. The Republicans eventually saw to it that the public utility controls were eliminated.
Unlike those other New Deal laws, however the National Labor Relations Act had, and still has, only small penalties for labor law breakers. The Employee Free Choice Act would sharply increase those fines and it would give the NLRB more power to get court orders against labor law breakers.
Employee free choice would allow workers to choose, either by majority sign-up or by election, whether they want union representation. Under the National Labor relations Act, the company makes that choice. Many companies that choose an election, which is run by Liebmans’s board, break the law during the campaign by harassing and even firing union supporters and by forcing workers to attend mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions
Liebman told Press Associates, the union news service, last week that, although she cannot take an official position for or against the Employee Free Choice Act, the National Labor relations Act is outmoded because “it is 70 years old and was written for an industrial era when workers toiled on the assembly line and often stayed with the same firm for years – not like now. I would hop any changes made take into account changes in the work
FULL story at link.