Salon.com > National Labor Relations Board

Wal-Mart’s Black Friday showdown

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 21:42:00 +0000

Employees at 1,000 Walmart stores across the country are planning to strike on Black Friday. The holiday period industrial action comes in the wake of a string of strikes by Walmart workers in several states and involving employees throughout the retailer's supply chain. As Josh Eidelson noted at the Nation, "seafood workers [went on strike] in June, [followed] by warehouse workers in September, and by 160 retail workers in twelve states last month."

"Black Friday," wrote Eidelson, "workers have pledged -- barring concessions from the company -- will bring their biggest disruptions yet." Walmart employees across the country have a host of grievances including unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, sexual harassment, excessive hours, forced labor and low pay. Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC flagged a leaked internal document (first obtained by HuffPo) that revealed that base pay at Walmart's Sam's Place stores can be as low as $8 an hour (or $16,000 per year), with wage increases in increments as low as 20 or 40 cents per hour. To put this in context, Gawker recently highlighted a Demos study that says that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

New trouble for ex-Romney aide

Thu, 03 May 2012 15:46:00 +0000

Last week, the Romney campaign finally broke its silence on an advisor's role in a growing scandal. A report released last night shows why it had to.

In September, Mitt Romney named former National Labor Relations Board Chairman Peter Schaumber as the co-chair of his campaign’s Labor Policy Advisory Committee. Then in March, the NLRB’s inspector general named Schaumber as the recipient of leaked confidential info from current NLRB member Terence Flynn – and the Romney campaign avoided comment for a month.

Last Thursday, Rep. Elijah Cummings announced that the IG would be releasing a follow-up report, and was referring his findings to the Office of Special Counsel “for potential Hatch Act violations due to Mr. Schaumber’s role as a senior advisor” to Romney. (The Hatch Act bans public officials from using government access to advance political campaigns.) The new report, released last night by the House Education and Workforce Committee Democrats, is a sequel that truly outdoes the original.

Romney mum on labor leaks

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:00:00 +0000

It’s been almost three weeks since the release of a National Labor Relations Board Inspector General report finding that Republican NLRB member Terence Flynn violated ethics rules. Since then, members of Congress from both parties have said the Justice Department should review the allegations. Flynn has bulked up his defense team with a former inspector general of his own -- Glenn Fine, who investigated the Bush DOJ. But there’s been no comment on the scandal from the White House, which promoted Flynn, or from the Romney campaign, whose advisor Peter Schaumber allegedly received secret info from him.

“This is the cronyism and bias that you absolutely don’t want in a government agency,” says Jeffrey Hirsch, a former NLRB attorney who now teaches law at the University of North Carolina. “If [Flynn] found out one of his board staff was giving info to, say, a Democratic former board member,” says Hirsch, “I can’t imagine he wouldn’t fire the person on the spot.” (Spokespersons for the White House and NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce both declined Salon’s request for comment. The Romney campaign did not respond to multiple requests.)

Team Romney’s alleged labor mole

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:30:00 +0000

On Sept. 2, the National Review posted on its website an Op-Ed blasting a new rule requiring companies to inform employees of their union rights. The article condemned the rule as “an unwarranted usurpation” and “regulatory sorcery” that “diminishes” the National Labor Relations Board. None of this was particularly interesting or surprising, given the conservative politics of the National Review and the article’s author, Peter Schaumber, a former NLRB chairman who’s now advising Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

More scintillating than the article itself is the story of its genesis, which was laid out in a report from the NLRB inspector general this week. According to the report, it appears the article was edited by current NLRB member Terence Flynn, who served as chief counsel to Schaumber when he sat on the board. The Op-Ed “appears to be a further revised version” of a file found on Flynn’s government-issued computer, complete with tracked-changes edits marked as Flynn’s. And the IG says Flynn wasn’t just providing Schaumber with freelance editing: he is also accused of violating ethics rules by leaking to Schaumber and other conservatives internal info from the agency they were out to obstruct.

How Boeing got away with breaking the law

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:38:00 +0000

Republicans won’t have the National Labor Relations Board's case against Boeing to kick around anymore – though no doubt they’ll keep flogging its corpse. On Friday, the NLRB announced it was dropping its most famous investigation in years. The union that had brought the case, the International Association of Machinists, asked the NLRB to relent following a compromise reached with management. The IAM is touting its deal as a better alternative than pursuing the NLRB case. They’re right – which is a damning measure of how poorly the Obama administration defends workers’ human rights.

At a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages, the Boeing case shows why it is so hard for workers to collect a larger share of national income. It highlights Republicans' resolute defense of law-breaking big business, and President Obama's lack of equivalent fire in defense of the 99 percent. Obama expresses sympathy for the occupation movement But in a case where he might have actually done something for the people who do America's work, he passed.