On Monday, in a nice victory for America’s union-free workplace, Barack Obama’s pro-union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board had their recently-imposed rules allowing for so-called “ambush” (or “quickie”) union elections overturned by the District Court for the District of Columbia.

In December, the Obama NLRB promulgated new rules (which went into effect on April 30th) that eviscerated an employer’s right to challenge a union’s petition to hold an election on unionizing select groups of employees (called units). This evisceration opened the door for union elections to take place in as little as 17 days from petition filing—down considerably from the NLRB’s median time frame of 38 days.

In its Monday ruling, the District Court cited Woody Allen as it ruled that the NLRB’s December promulgation did not have the required quorum:

According to Woody Allen, eighty percent of life is just showing up. When it comes to satisfying a quorum requirement, though, showing up is even more important than that. Indeed, it is the only thing that matters – even when the quorum is constituted electronically.  In this case, because no quorum ever existed for the pivotal vote in question, the Court must hold that the challenged rule is invalid.

The challenge to the rule was brought by the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and its litigation partners at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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On Monday, April 30th, Barack Obama’s union-controlled National Labor Relations Board will be imposing its new union election rules, designed to ambush unsuspecting employers. Since unions won over 71% of the 1595 NLRB-conducted elections in 2011, the NLRB’s radical departure from past precedent is neither necessary, nor warranted. Moreover, given unions’ legal ability to deceive workers into unionizing, it is believed the NLRB’s doing union’s bidding will result in smaller companies and their employees falling prey to unionization.

While the NLRB’s purported ‘streamlining’ of its election procedures seems simple, to those who have experienced the tumultuous time when a union has targeted a company, the ability of the union-controlled NLRB to now eviscerate employers’ ability to challenge the validity of a union’s attack through a fair hearing opens the door to a drastic reduction of time an employer has to respond.

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On the eve of Obama’s NLRB unleashing its new rules giving unions the ability to hold ambush elections—that is, the evisceration of employers’ ability to question or challenge unions in their quest to cherry-pick voting units—more data was just released by the Bureau of National Affairs that calls into question why anyone in their right mind would pay dues to a union today.

In addition to the $369 billion in underfunded union (private-sector) pension plans, the abundant evidence that unions kill companies and destroy jobs, today’s unions are doing such a miserable job at the one thing they’re supposed to do—negotiate contracts—that union members should demand refunds from their union bosses.

According to the April 9th issue of the Bureau of National Affairs Daily Labor Report (subscription required), unions negotiated contracts in 2011 that, in 41% of the contracts, employees received no increase in the contracts’ first year.

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* See update at bottom.

 As today’s government-union bosses push higher taxes, establish dues schemes to fund their bloated salaries and union-bought politicians, the evidence has become pretty clear: Government unions have become political, parasitic entities injuring taxpayers and the communities they control (see Central Falls and Providence, RI; Detroit, MI; and the once-great State of California for examples).

In the private sector, however, where taxpayers’ pockets are not in endless supply, the parasitic model of today’s unions, far too often, allows unions drain companies and ends up killing their hosts.

• Related: Ohio Business Owner Shot For Being Non-Union, Police Investigating

In large measure, the power unions have gained to cripple economies and companies comes from the ability to require workers to pay union dues (or have the workers fired from their jobs should they refuse to pay the union tribute).

In the public sector, union bosses have declared war on Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, Ohio’s John Kasich, Florida’s Rick Scott and, to a lesser extent, Arizona’s Jan Brewer, for their threats to union treasuries through collective bargaining reform.

In the private sector, however, while Indiana finally became the 23rd state in the nation to became a Right-to-Work state—which outlaws unions from having workers fired for refusing to pay union dues—other states like, Maine and Ohio are considering the reform, as well.

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It was less than a year ago that Barack Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe said:

After 2½ years in office, President Obama now “owns” the economy as an issue, according to top adviser David Plouffe, who added he was confident that voters understand that recovering from a devastating recession Mr. Obama inherited takes time.

“Of course he does,” Mr. Plouffe told NBC’s “Today” show host Matt Lauer when asked point-blank if Mr. Obama owns the economy.

“But the American people understand that we — it took us a long time to get to this mess,” Mr. Plouffe said. “It’s going to take us some time to come out. We are making progress.”

Well, after Friday’s jobs numbers came out (the economy added 120,000 jobs) Labor Secretary Hilda Solis promptly proclaimed: “That’s a noteworthy achievement.”

In fact, for the man who campaigned on the message of “hope” in 2008, the 120,000 jobs added is much fewer (about half) than expected and the edging down of the unemployment to 8.2% is not from job creation but from hopelessness.

There are now 88 million American who are “Not In Labor Force,” according to Department of Labor statistics, which the St. Louis Federal Reserve put into this pretty chart:

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As you watch the video below [via SEIU Monitor], you can tell the astroturf protesters bused in by the SEIU yesterday to protest outside the Supreme Court for ObamaCare hold some very deep convictions. In fact, their convictions run so deep, it seems all they care about is the $20 given to them in brown envelopes by their union handlers.

Ironically, as SEIU Monitor points out, back when ObamaCare was being debated in 2009, the SEIU published “Your Guide to Corporate Astroturfing: Lobbyist-Run Groups Orchestrating…”

Of course, unions and hypocrisy are somewhat synonymous, aren’t they?

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Union thugs protesting outside the homes of their targets has become a weapon more and more unions have added to their already-large arsenal. Now that the State of Georgia may become the first state to outlaw the offensive tactic, oddly enough, unions are getting support from an unlikely source–the Tea Party Patriots.

Last year, when 45,000 union members struck telephone carrier Verizon, IBEW union radicals showed up outside the home of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s House causing a disturbance in McAdam’s neighborhood (see video below). In another incident, up to 3,000 CWA protesters conducted a mock funeral outside the home of Verizon’s chairman.

Though it shouldn’t be necessary for any legislature to even have to consider the protection of private residences from protesters, these incidents (and others like it) have drawn the attention of Georgia’s legislature, which has moved to pass Senate Bill 469 to prohibit the targeting of individuals at their private residences.

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For all of the pro-union leanings of President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board appointees, the NLRB is, unwittingly, about to do something that those of us in the preventive labor relations field have been doing for years: Educate employees that they don’t need to pay dues to a union in order to exercise their rights.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act.  The cornerstone of the law, which applies to most private-sector workplaces with two or more employees, is what is known as employees’ Section Seven Rights.

Section Seven is as follows [emphasis added]:

Sec. 7. [§ 157.] Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].

What many employees (and employers) don’t realize is that employees without a union have the exact same rights as they do with a union and, often times, even more. As a result, every year, thousands of employees get duped into unionization and paying union dues when, if they knew their already-existing rights, they might never entertain the thought.

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“Rudy Lazano and I worked closely together to try and build a relationship between Latino and African American activists and union types. We called ourselves progressives.”

Congressman Danny K Davis, Feb. 26, 2012.

A longtime ally of President Barack Obama, Congressman Danny K. Davis [D-IL] was in Chicago recently accepting the Social Justice Award from People’s World, a Communist-based website.

The editorial mission is partisan to the working class, people of color, women, young people, seniors, LGBT community, to international solidarity; to popularize the ideas of Marxism and Bill of Rights socialism. The websites enjoy a special relationship with the Communist Party USA, founded in 1919, and publish its news and views. [Emphasis added]

[Ironically, the staff members of People's World are members of the Newspaper Guild, CWA, AFL-CIO.]

The award was given to the Congressman at the Chicago headquarters of the Communist Party USA—a location that the Congressman seemed to be perfectly comfortable at accepting his award as you can see by this video [via BigGovernment]

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On Friday, Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson approved the union-dominated National Labor Relations Board’s mandate on nearly all private-sector companies to post so-called “union rights posters.” Additionally, Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, declined to hear a challenge to Obama’s recent NLRB appointments.

In the union rights poster ruling, Berman Jackson ruled that the NLRB did not exceed its statutory authority to require private-sector employers that fall within the scope of the NLRB to post notices to employees advising them of their right to unionize. This means that most companies with two or more employees (outside of the airline or railroad industries) will be required to post the union rights posters (see PDF copy here) on April 30, 2012.

In a small bone threw to employers, Jackson did rule, according to the Hill, that the failure to post a notice would not be an automatic Unfair Labor Practice, as the NLRB originally proposed in its ruling:

She did rule, however, that the NLRB cannot “make a blanket advance determination that a failure to post [the notice] will always constitute an unfair labor practice,” though it can be considered in individual cases.

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