By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

LUBBOCK, Texas (PAI)—Anti-worker, anti-union right wingers and business groups have found a sure-fire way to trash pro-worker federal rules: Find a federal judge in Texas, especially rural Texas, to rule your way.

One such jurist halted the Labor Department’s plan to shine a light on union busters’ spending.

That’s the win the National Federation of Independent Business gained on June 27. Joined by the National Association of Home Builders and 10 Republican-run states, NFIB got U.S. District Judge Sam Cummings in Lubbock, Texas, to halt the Labor Department’s rule cracking down on the so-called “persuaders.” A similar case is pending in Minnesota.

DOL issued the persuader rule in March and scheduled it to take effect on July 1. It says the persuaders – the union-busters – must disclose their spending on such activities if they either formally campaign against union organizers on behalf of employers, or if they advise employers on how to do so.

“Workers should know who is behind an anti-union message. It’s a matter of basic fairness,” U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez said in a recent statement. “This new rule will allow workers to know whether the messages they’re hearing are coming directly from their employer or from a paid, third-party consultant."

“Plaintiffs” – the trade groups – and "intervenor-plantiffs” – the 10 states – “are likely to succeed on their claim that DOL’s new rule exceeds DOL’s authority” under the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act, which first discussed such “persuaders” and their roles, Cummings said. So he issued a nationwide injunction stopping the persuader rule from taking effect.

The legal language imposes the rule against persuaders who “directly or indirectly” influence business in its positions on union organizing campaigns.

Such “advice” – everything from writing speeches to setting up captive audience meetings to winks and nods if an employer schemes to break labor law – has turned union-busting into a multi-million-dollar industry, while thwarting or trashing thousands of organizing drives over the last 57 years.

“Once they have learned a consultant has been hired to persuade them, employees will be able to consider whether the consultant is serving as a neutral, disinterested third party, hired to guide the employer in adhering to NLRB election rules, or rather as one who has been hired as a specialist in defeating union organizing campaigns,” DOL said in its new rule. DOL defended its rule in the Texas court. No unions were called to testify.

Under Landrum-Griffin, formally called the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, unions must report virtually every penny of their spending. But Landrum-Griffin also had some provisions affecting management. Those provisions, however, had an exemption for “advice” employers get – including “advice” from union-busters.

DOL’s new rule “effectively eliminates the statute’s ‘advice’ exemption,” Cummings stated in his 90-page document justifying his injunction against DOL. That exemption had let the “persuaders” – management-side law firms and union-busters – get away with disclosing nothing as long as they didn’t directly contact workers during union organizing drives.

The judge said that to justify its new rule, DOL confused advice with actual action by the persuaders. “In the course of that struggle, DOL ends up drawing lines that are simply incoherent,” he stated.  And he said DOL’s new rule chills the persuaders’ freedom of speech. "DOL never adequately explains why it is abandoning its longstanding advice exemption now."