Who cares if businesses are destroyed, the owners are capitalist pigs.*
(Big Government)– Imagine yourself a small business owner with 50 employees or so. You’ve just spent the last two years of the Great Recession barely keeping your head above water, taking on some debt to keep your business viable. You’ve made a promise to yourself not to lay any of your employees off, but you also haven’t been able to give any raises, you’ve had to take away dental benefits, and everyone’s health care costs are going up this year because of ObamaCare.
At last, though, things are starting to look up a little and you finally have enough business to hire a couple of new employees. After a fairly extensive search, you find a couple of candidates who seem like good fits. They’ve been unemployed for a while and seem really grateful that you’ve given them a job. It turns out, they’re pretty knowledgeable on running equipment and seem to get along really well with your other employees.
Well, a few months go by and one Friday afternoon, just before you’re to head home for the weekend, you get a fax from the National Labor Relations Board. The fax states that “unfair labor practice” charges have been filed against you and your company. Among other charges are those alleging that you fired a pro-union employee, interrogated employees, solicited grievances, made promises of benefits, and threatened to close…all illegal acts. . . .
While you don’t remember all of the details of that meeting, the lawyer’s account (which he got from the NLRB) sounds pretty accurate. Now, your lawyer tells you, you can fight the charges which may cost you $50,000 to $100,000 and you’ll still probably lose, or you can settle the charges.
Here’s what the NLRB wants:
- You must give the union a list of all of your employees’ names and addresses so the union can contact them at home
- You must let the union post information on your bulletin boards
- You must allow the union to come into your company and meet with your employees
- You must offer full reinstatement to the pro-union employee, with backpay (even though he was fired for damaging a customer’s order—purposefully you suspect)
- Lastly, you must stand in front of your employees and read out loud the posting of the settlement with the NLRB
If you don’t settle the charges, your lawyer tells you, the NLRB is prepared to go to federal court to get an injunction ordering you to comply.
Oh, and by the way, your attorney tells you, that pro-union employee (one of the new hires you had hired a few months back) appears to be a union salt—whose sole purpose was to get hired in order to unionize your company.
If this sounds implausible, it shouldn’t. It is precisely the machinery that the union-controlled National Labor Relations Board set into place…last month.
*Official White House position.