By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI) - Government agencies during this latter part of the Obama Administration have issued a plethora of worker- and consumer-friendly rules made outside of the reach of Congress or the courts.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is not happy: Saying the new federal rules slow the economy and harm business, he unveiled a comprehensive regulatory cutback scheme to trash labor, consumer and other rules and turn most other regulations over to the states.

And he took particular aim at pro-worker agency rules, including those from the National Labor Relations Board. “Since 2009, NLRB has consistently pursued an agenda that favors union activism while turning a blind eye to the concerns of employers, workers, and rank-and-file union members,” Ryan claims. He conveniently omitted that prior GOP-majority boards favored businesses.

Ryan’s 57-page document, released June 14, is part of a six-plan Republican agenda he’s putting forward as a platform before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The House speaker hopes, but with no particular promise of follow-through, that presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump will endorse that agenda as an outline for policies should Trump win the White House and the GOP retain control of Congress.

Ryan’s regulatory agenda – which might be better called an anti-regulatory agenda – includes halting most major rules until Congress approves them, and turning most areas back to the states. The GOP and its right wing and business backers now run most states.

And he reserves a specific section for criticizing the NLRB. Ryan charges the board with favoring union leaders at the expense of businesses and promoting “a culture of union favoritism.” Republicans “would hold the rogue board accountable to workers and employers,” the speaker claims.

Ryan also proposes “less judicial deference” to regulatory agencies and their expertise, code words asking the courts to toss out agency rules, including pro-worker rules. He would ban most rules, including NLRB rules, from taking effect until after the judges decide on them.

“It is hard to imagine a federal agency that has imposed more radical change on America’s workplaces than the political appointees at the National Labor Relations Board,” Ryan declares. “This partisan federal agency is made up of unelected board members who have significant power to determine and implement policies impacting workers and privately owned business."

One big Ryan complaint is the board approved what Republicans snidely call “micro-unions.” He says “unions have long sought to organize small ‘units’ of employees as an incremental step toward organizing an entire workplace. In the 2011 Specialty Healthcare decision, the board imposed a new standard that ensures the NLRB approves virtually every unit proposed by union organizers, no matter how small the group may be.” The GOP has denounced, and unsuccessfully tried to overturn the board’s decision.

“The board has also adopted new rules to encourage ambush union elections” – a common GOP phrase for the NLRB’s refined union election rules – “that will deprive employers of their right to speak to employees, stifle the right of workers to make informed decisions, and jeopardize the privacy of workers and their families,” Ryan’s regulatory agenda charges.

“These troubling actions are in addition to other actions that restricted access to secret ballot elections, made it more difficult for workers to challenge union representation, and weakened protections for neutral employers from union attacks.”

Ryan’s solution is “aggressive oversight of the NLRB’s attempts to implement policies and regulations skewed in favor of special-interest union supporters” and “legislative solutions to overturn the board’s extreme agenda and restore labor policies” of prior decades.

He also wants laws to “guarantee fair union elections, reinstate the traditional joint-employer standard, and ensure bargaining units promote the best interests of all workers in a workplace.” The fair elections section is GOP code for outlawing card-check recognition.

The board’s planned joint-employer standard would hold a franchise grantor – think McDonald’s headquarters – and a franchise-holder – your local McDonald’s – jointly responsible for obeying labor law, or for breaking it. Other Ryan regulation proposals include:

• Dumping OSHA’s decision to let union representatives have “walk-around rights” in job safety and health accidents. Left unsaid: The union reps are called in at the request of the workers – or their families – who are hurt or killed. Ryan charges walk-around rights “promote a culture of union favoritism.”

• Changing financial rules, notably those enacted after the 2008 Great Recession and enforced by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Ryan charges the agency is so powerful that its director – who cannot be removed except for cause – “can declare any consumer-credit product ‘unfair’ or ‘abusive’ and outlaw it. He also complained about the prohibition on mandatory arbitration cases that prevent class action lawsuits.

The NLRB, and more recently the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, have tossed out such mandatory arbitration clauses. The court says arbitration’s class action ban breaks labor law rights of workers to join together in any way for mutual aid and protection. Company-imposed arbitration is almost always stacked against workers and consumers.

• Ryan also wants to repeal the Labor Department’s new rule that orders financial advisors to put the interests of customers first, before their own. Workers and their allies strongly support DOL. Ryan claims the DOL rule will cut off investment “advice.”

• Drop President Barack Obama’s executive orders affecting workers. Ryan especially denounces Obama’s order that, he claims, “will unfairly deny federal contracts to an employer who is alleged (his emphasis) to have violated more than a dozen federal labor laws and equivalent state laws,” such as the National Labor Relations Act, minimum wage and overtime pay laws and job safety and health laws.

“Federal bureaucrats -- who may not even have expertise in federal labor law -- will be empowered to review an employer’s compliance history and decide whether the employer’s actions demonstrate a ‘lack of integrity of business ethics,’” Ryan’s regulatory agenda charges.

Ryan grudgingly admits that “no employer with a history of violating worker rights should be rewarded with federal contracts paid with taxpayer dollars.” But he then turns around and claims the present federal suspension and debarment system – which imposes bans on violators for short periods – is enough “to hold bad actors accountable.”

• Ryan also decries “new restrictions on independent contractors,” while not admitting that employers misclassify workers as “independent contractors” to evade labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, workers comp, jobless benefits – and to ban workers from organizing.

The Labor Department’s guidance on who can be an independent contractor “confines the workforce to an employer-employee relationship not suited for the 21st century,” Ryan’s report charges. “The new guidance, combined with the department’s aggressive enforcement, is alarming to employers who utilize independent contractors. These include companies that are part of the emerging ‘sharing’ economy, such as Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit.

He claims the end results include “fewer opportunities” for businesses “and greater costs and burdens for employers.”

Ryan singled out DOL for making comment periods too short, in its rule doubling the salary cap under which workers are eligible for overtime pay and its rule telling 500,000 federal contractors – such as restaurants in national parks or U.S. museums – to provide workers with paid sick leave. The overtime rule in particular, he claims, would cause “significant disruptions” for businesses, universities and non-profit groups.