Last month, the Biden administration pulled off a major move that received little coverage.
Right after Joe Biden assumed the presidency, the Office of Presidential Personnel pushed for NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb to resign or get canned. Robb refused to hand in his designation, arguing that this demand was unprecedented. That same day, Robb ended up being fired. Similarly, Robb’s deputy, Alice Stuck, received a similar threat and was fired the following day after she refused to tender her resignation.
Ever since the office of the NLRB General Counsel was set up in 1947, no president fired a sitting General Counsel of the NLRB before the end of their four-year term, which the Senate originally confirmed. Even when the White House’s occupant changed, these General Counsels would still never be fired.
Take for example the case of Obama’s pick for General Counsel, former union lawyer Richard Griffin. He stayed as the General Counsel for the bulk of the first year after Trump was elected. Griffin’s term expired on October 31, 2017.
In response to this controversial firing, National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix made the following statement:
“This unprecedented move to oust NLRB General Counsel Robb before the end of his Senate-confirmed four-year term is the very opposite of a return to ‘normal’ and a disturbing sign of just how far the Biden-Harris Administration is willing to go to pay back the union bosses that helped put Biden in the White House. The reason Big Labor officials are so eager to oust Robb is that he has frequently defended the rights of rank-and-file workers who are the targets of union coercion, as evidenced by dozens of cases brought by workers with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation. For the sake of independent-minded workers everywhere, Robb should stay at the NLRB and serve out the remainder of his term.”
Legal action organizations for workers like the National Right to Work Foundation filed dozens of NLRB cases for workers fighting union coercion when Robb was General Counsel. Generally speaking, Robb often defended workers’ rights in the aforementioned cases.
A spokesperson for the National Right to Work Committee highlighted some of the cases where Robb stood up for workers:
Robb has supported workers in Foundation-backed cases where they are seeking to abolish double standards that let employers help union boss efforts to install unions, but punish employers for providing the same assistance for workers looking to remove a union; cases where workers seek to shield their hard-earned money from going to union boss politics (including efforts to elect Biden); and has supported rule changes that make it easier for employees to vote out unions that were unpopular or established themselves through underhanded means; and much more.
This case has flown under the radar but it’s emblematic of the multiple fronts the Left attacks Americans.
Unions can play a role in a nationalist movement insofar as they can provide muscle to beat mass migration which depresses worker wages. But they first must be reformed in a way that curtails union boss abuses and ends many of these union chiefs’ rent-seeking ways.
Keeping managerial state-connected union bosses in check would be the most constructive way of dealing with the problem of unionization.
