There's some great news on the labor front coming out of newly announced labor appointments. There are a whole host of positions to be appointed in both the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. Progressive appointments here give us a chance to re-shape labor policy through administrative processes and help expand the power of workers in the 21st century.
Follow me over the fold and we'll meet some of these appointees.
The first proposed appointment is a name many should be familiar with from rumors over the Department of Labor appointment. Let's re-introduce Mary Beth Maxwell.
Obama named Mary Beth Maxwell, a founder of the card-check-advocacy group American Rights at Work, as a senior adviser at the Labor Department.
Mary Beth Maxwell is the founding Executive Director of American Rights at Work, a national advocacy organization launched in 2003 whose mission is to modernize and reform our nation's labor laws to better meet the needs of 21st century employers and workers. Maxwell's work has garnered national news coverage in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among many other news outlets, dramatically altering the public debate about the need for employers and workers to have access to a fair collective bargaining process.
Maxwell is the author of the organization's inaugural report, Some of Them Are Brave: The Unfulfilled Promise of American Labor Law. She is widely acknowledged as the leading voice for improving the effectiveness of the National Labor Relations Board and in finding common ground among diverse groups to solve problems in our nation's antiquated labor-management public policies.
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Mary Beth Maxwell is a tremendous advocate for workers across the country. The Las Vegas Sun article references her nomation and suggests it's a boost for the Employee Free Choice Act. I doubt that's the case, as the Department of Labor oversees employment law, not labor law (things like the Fair Labor Standards Act, for example). However, this is a great development for workers rights. The Elaine Chu administration was notoriously anti-worker and helped implement management-favored policies like "Family Flextime", a backdoor way to destroy overtime pay. Chu also tied the enforcement hands of the DOL. Maxwell's worked on a variety of important workers issues before and her voice in the process should mean even more pro-worker policies from the already solid Secretary Solis.
For those of you interested in labor law (union law, if you will), Obama's nominees to the National Labor Relations Board should be even more exciting.
Obama also nominated two veteran labor lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board. The five-member panel has been operating with just two members since late 2007, amassing a backlog of cases of disputes between workers and management.
Nominee Craig Becker is currently associate general counsel for the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO, and a longtime law professor. Mark Pearce is a career labor lawyer in private practice.
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Craig Becker currently serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1978 and received his J.D. in 1981 from Yale Law School where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Donald P. Lay, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. For the past 27 years, he has practiced and taught labor law. He was a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law between 1989 and 1994 and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Georgetown Law Schools. He has published numerous articles on labor and employment law in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Chicago Law Review, and has argued labor and employment cases in virtually every federal court of appeals and before the United States Supreme Court.
Mark Gaston Pearce has been a labor lawyer for his entire career. He is one of the founding partners of the Buffalo, New York law firm of Creighton, Pearce, Johnsen & Giroux where he practices union side labor and employment law before state and federal courts and agencies including the N.Y.S. Public Employment Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the National Labor Relations Board. Pearce in 2008 was appointed by the NYS Governor to serve as a Board Member on the New York State Industrial Board of Appeals, an independent quasi-judicial agency responsible for review of certain rulings and compliance orders of the NYS Department of Labor in matters including wage and hour law. Pearce has taught several courses in the labor studies program at Cornell University's School of Industrial Labor Relations Extension. He is a Fellow in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Prior to 2002, Pearce practiced union side labor law and employment law at Lipsitz, Green, Fahringer, Roll, Salisbury & Cambria LLP. From 1979 to 1994, he was an attorney and District Trial Specialist for the NLRB in Buffalo, NY. Pearce received his J.D. from State University of New York, and his B.A. from Cornell University.
These are incredible appointments to the NLRB. Mr. Becker is a top attorney for SEIU and Mr. Pearce is a well regarded union side labor lawyer. These two easily shift the balance on the over-worked, understaffed NLRB back to the direct of labor. The NLRB during the Bush era passed a wide variety of anti-worker decisions, such as the well known Kentucky River decision that allowed management to designatre individual with minute managerial roles as "supervisors" exempt from union membership. These two appointees should help return the balance at the National Labor Relations Board.
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