Edward J. McElroy, AFT President, on President Bush's Appointment of Peter Kirsanow to NLRB
Labor Desk
January 11, 2006
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Last week, President Bush once again bypassed the U.S. Senate on a critical federal appointment and named Peter Kirsanow to fill a vacancy on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A recess appointment like this one is a subversion of our democratic process, a conclusion amplified by the incompatibility of this appointee for the job.
In his writings and statements, Mr. Kirsanow has been openly hostile toward unions, taken stands against the minimum wage, affirmative action, prevailing wages, voting rights legislation and other basic protections for U.S. workers and citizens. In a speech in Detroit last year, Mr. Kirsanow, who serves on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, even raised the idea of detention camps for Arab-Americans if the United States is ever again attacked by terrorists with the same ethnic background as the Sept. 11 highjackers.
This surely isn’t the best choice for a person whose job is to ensure that workers’ rights are protected. This isn’t the best person to be counted on to see that representation elections take place in a timely manner and that a federal board designed to enforce labor laws remains fair and neutral.
Given a chance, members of the Senate, at the very least, would have raised serious questions about the background of this appointee. Those questions never were able to be asked.
During this president’s term in office, the NLRB has become a national embarrassment - a political entity rather than a body for fair adjudication of the nation’s labor laws. For example, Sen. Arlen Specter, in a Senate hearing not long ago, asked Board Chairman Robert J. Battista why the NLRB had reversed a 2000 decision that said research and teaching assistants at private universities were workers. The senator wanted to know what had changed. He asked if the decision was political. Battista’s response was that “the decision was partisan, not political.”
AFT members and others who work in education, healthcare and other fields require fair-minded commissioners and neutrality - not politics or partisanship - from the NLRB. President Bush’s latest appointment does nothing to improve the board’s credibility or neutrality. It is a disgrace.
In his writings and statements, Mr. Kirsanow has been openly hostile toward unions, taken stands against the minimum wage, affirmative action, prevailing wages, voting rights legislation and other basic protections for U.S. workers and citizens. In a speech in Detroit last year, Mr. Kirsanow, who serves on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, even raised the idea of detention camps for Arab-Americans if the United States is ever again attacked by terrorists with the same ethnic background as the Sept. 11 highjackers.
This surely isn’t the best choice for a person whose job is to ensure that workers’ rights are protected. This isn’t the best person to be counted on to see that representation elections take place in a timely manner and that a federal board designed to enforce labor laws remains fair and neutral.
Given a chance, members of the Senate, at the very least, would have raised serious questions about the background of this appointee. Those questions never were able to be asked.
During this president’s term in office, the NLRB has become a national embarrassment - a political entity rather than a body for fair adjudication of the nation’s labor laws. For example, Sen. Arlen Specter, in a Senate hearing not long ago, asked Board Chairman Robert J. Battista why the NLRB had reversed a 2000 decision that said research and teaching assistants at private universities were workers. The senator wanted to know what had changed. He asked if the decision was political. Battista’s response was that “the decision was partisan, not political.”
AFT members and others who work in education, healthcare and other fields require fair-minded commissioners and neutrality - not politics or partisanship - from the NLRB. President Bush’s latest appointment does nothing to improve the board’s credibility or neutrality. It is a disgrace.
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