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By Mark Gruenberg
WASHINGTON—The anti-worker so-called National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund—the lawsuit arm of the vicious and venal “right to work” crowd—has seized upon a Unite Here organizing drive at a Boston hotel to try to outlaw company neutrality during any union campaign.
In two cases filed on Dec. 6, the defense fund asked the board, which now has just three members, all right-wing GOP white men, to ban the Yotel Boston Hotel—and any other employer–from being neutral during organizing drives.
Neutrality, the RTW worker and union-haters argue, is illegal corporate aid to unions and organizing, and leads to illegal recognition of the union.
If the RTW crowd wins, after a hearing expected in March, or after a February hearing involving Unite Here and an Embassy Suites hotel in Seattle, organizing drives nationwide would be severely hampered.
Workers and unions already face uphill battles, due to past NLRB and business legal roadblocks. Neutrality removes many of them.
The RTW crowd went to the NLRB, “on behalf of,” it said, four dissident workers at Yotel. Before that, Unite Here Local 26, which had won neutrality and card-check recognition from Yotel, was bargaining for a first contract, but the coronavirus pandemic halted the talks.
“This is another last-gasp Trump administration move, similar to ending protections for birds, drilling in Alaska, and gutting the civil service,” Local 26 President Carlos Aramayo told the ucomm labor blog. “As he’s walking out the door there’s these attempts to throw as many bombs as he possibly can.”
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