ENZI HIGHLIGHTS BIPARTISAN LETTER OPPOSING “EMPLOYEE NO CHOICE ACT;” FORMER NLRB MEMBERS CONDEMN BILL

ENZI HIGHLIGHTS BIPARTISAN LETTER OPPOSING “EMPLOYEE NO CHOICE ACT;” FORMER NLRB MEMBERS CONDEMN BILL Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY), Ranking Member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee today said a bipartisan group of former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) members have called on the Senate to reject the so called “Employee Free Choice Act,” H.R. 800, saying there is no better way to ensure true employee choice than protecting the private ballot when workers are faced with the choice to accept or reject union representation. In remarks on the Senate floor, Enzi highlighted a letter received today from six former members of the NLRB, who were appointed by both Democrat and Republican administrations, which declared the bill “fundamentally flawed.” “This legislation is not about employees, nor is it about enhancing employee rights,” Enzi said. “This legislation certainly has nothing to do with free choice either. Plain and simple, this bill is about unfairly and artificially boosting organized labor’s steadily declining membership at the expense of essential employee democratic rights.” “Americans get a private ballot when they choose their President, their Congressmen, their councilmen, even their PTA leaders – why should they not have the same right in the workplace when they decide whether they want a union to become their exclusive, legal representative in their workplace?” Enzi added. “Government’s important role is to guarantee that employees have the maximum freedom possible to make their own choice as to whether they do, or do not wish to be represented by a union in their workplace.”Among the objections raised by the former NLRB members were: • federal courts, and virtually all experienced labor law practitioners agree that authorization cards sanctioned by the bill are inherently unreliable indicators of true employee choice;• secret ballot elections are the most fair, accurate and democratic ways to determine a worker’s free choice on any matter;• binding arbitration provisions included in the bill would radically change the process of private sector, collective-bargaining in the United States and also would do grave damage to that time-honored process; and• remedial provisions contained in the bill are unnecessary and counter-productive and would allow punitive sanctions, taking away current incentives to voluntarily resolve claims before the NLRB. Reviewing the letter in his remarks today, Enzi called on the Senate to “flatly reject the notion that we should even further consider this unwarranted and destructive legislation.” “The Senate has too many matters of genuine substance and importance to be spending time on legislation that is plainly designed to profit special interests at the cost of fundamental employee rights,” he concluded.