Instead of Filling Vacancies, Congress Should Abolish the NLRB

Reason discusses the National Labor Relations Board vacancies with Trey Kovacs.

The U.S. Senate voted earlier this month to confirm Marvin Kaplan’s appointment to the National Labor Relations Board, filling one of two vacancies on the five-member panel charged with setting policy for union elections and for adjudicating conflicts between union workers and employers.

Rather than fill the other vacancy on the highly politicized board—which operated with only three members during most of the Obama administration because Senate Republicans refused to confirm appointees—perhaps Congress should do away with the board altogether.

Created in 1933 as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act, a Depression-era law that gave the president sweeping authority to institute wage and price controls, the NLRB existed to settle sometimes-violent disputes that erupted between unions and employers. It is well past time to recognize the fundamental flaws in the NLRB, which have led the board to become politicized and partisan, says says Trey Kovacs, a labor policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.

“The NLRB was created to be impartial government members that represented the public interest in labor disputes. That no longer happens,” Kovacs says. “Democrats and Republicans basically appoint labor lawyers or employment lawyers who favor one side or the other, so it no longer represents the public interest.”

…

“Case precedent flip-flops depending on which party is in power,” says Kovacs. “So they don’t really exercise any expertise, just their political will.”

Read the full article at Reason.