Monday, October 07, 2002

labor Two labor news items:

(1) The President has begun the process of intervention on the docks, by appointing a Board of Inquiry under 29 U.S.C. sec. 176 et seq.. (Click here and find "board of inquiry" if you want to read the statute). This does not mean that the lockout ends now; it means that a panel will marshall facts for the President to consider, so that he can then tell the AG to ask a court to enjoin the lockout. This will take a few days, presumably.

(2) The President has also nominated NLRB Member Liebman to another term, which means that there is now a full complement of nominees to the five-member Board and therefore the confirmation process will presumably gear up sooner rather than later. Member Liebman is considered a liberal member of the Board, and was a union lawyer for some years. I tend to like her decisions. Apparently the White House couldn't resist a little bit of dicking around, by nominating her to a different spot than the one she now occupies, so that she will have less than a full additional five-year term. Petty stuff, the sort that gives politics a bad name. [UPDATE: If you're wondering why the President would nominate a "liberal", or thinking of offering this as proof that he's a uniter not a divider, let me explain: the NLRB is one of those agencies which is always almost equally-divided between Democrats and Republicans, with a good bit of behind-the-scenes compromise going on about who will be appointed. Perhaps this is a good model for judicial appointments, too: involvement by the Senate and interest groups on all sides before nominations are made, so that the courts are more-or-less balanced though with some fluctuation of mojo depending on who's in the White House?]

posted by sam 11:24 AM 0 comments

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