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After the Senate rejected another proposal by Republicans to make it harder for employees to form a union in their workplace, Sen. John Thune made a visit to Fox's Neil Cavuto this Tuesday to complain about those "big union bosses" getting their payback from Democrats, because heaven forbid we're not going to allow companies lots of time to intimidate, harass and potentially fire their employees who would like to unionize.

From the AFL-CIO -- Republican Attack on Fair Union Election Rule Fails in Senate:

Congressional Republicans today failed in their latest attempt to roll back workers’ rights. The U.S. Senate defeated (45-54) a measure (S.J. Res. 36) to kill a new National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rule that makes modest changes in the procedures for workers who want to vote on whether to form a union. It also would have banned the NLRB from ever issuing any similar fair election rule. [...]

Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP), said of the Republican proposal:

It is disappointing that in the face of growing income inequality and stagnant wages for all but the highest earners, lawmakers would fail to stand by workers who seek only to exercise their legal rights in an atmosphere free of intimidation and retaliation.

The rule is due to take effect April 30 and it will help alleviate the delays, inefficiencies, abuse of process and unnecessary litigation that plague the current system. Under current rules, workers can be forced to wait months or even years before they are allowed to vote on joining a union and then begin bargaining for a fair contract. The new NLRB rule eliminates many of those roadblocks by reducing current delays and eliminating frivolous litigation.

Contrary to the vitriolic attacks by Republican lawmakers, the new rule does not encourage or discourage unionization and it applies to elections to form a union and elections to decertify a union.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the Republican attack on the NLRB ”is just the latest in this relentless series of nationally coordinated assaults on workers and collective bargaining rights.” [...]

In November, House Republicans approved a bill that gives employers new tools to combat and delay elections by workers who try to form unions. It was a direct response to the new NLRB election rule. The Senate didn’t take up the measure.

Congressional Republicans have made nearly 50 separate assaults on the NLRB since last year by holding hearings, issuing subpoenas and proposing bills to gut the agency’s funding and eliminate its ability to hold employers accountable for violating workers’ rights, according to American Rights at Work (ARAW). Click here for a detailed look.

Thune's interview with Cavuto below the fold.

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As I've already written about here in my post on Neil Cavuto bringing in a speed reader to attack government regulations, as Media Matters pointed out, Fox News began a week long assault on government regulations in conjunction with the GOP's push to roll those regulations back as well. During their weekly address, Rep. Peter Roskam continued that assault.

Some of the businesses he named off have already been written about at C&L, such as the Gibson guitar case, and the GOP's attempt to gut the NLRB and their union busting in the Boeing case. Roskam also mentioned a business called Chicago White Metal Casting, which is "a third-generation family-owned die casting company employing 250 workers in suburban Chicago", that apparently isn't too happy about the amount of paperwork they're having to do in order to comply with the Clean Air Act and mercury emissions standards.

Fox did some follow up on the numbers being pushed over at Fox "News" on the costs of regulations which I'm sure were fed to them straight from the GOP here -- Fox's Attack On Regulations Relies On Widely Discredited Cost Estimate:

As part of a weeklong series helping to push an anti-regulatory agenda, Fox News is citing a discredited estimate that regulations cost businesses on average $161,000 each year. The estimate, which comes from a report prepared by outside researchers for the Small Business Administration, has been criticized for using a flawed research design, cherry-picking the highest cost estimates, and relying on "crude" data.

Lots more there and I don't want to just copy and paste all of their research here, so just go read the rest. And they also followed with another post this weekend which took a closer look at just what government programs, laws and regulations Fox, and by default the GOP were carping about as "burdensome" to small business owners.

Fox's War On Regulations Takes On Child Labor, Workplace Safety, Civil Rights Laws:

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Anyone think that Sen. Tom Coburn sounds like he's been spending a little too much time paling around with Glenn Beck after listening to this interview with Neil Cavuto? And this is the guy that is continually painted as some "reasonable" Republican that is willing to work with Democrats in the Senate. Tom Coburn went into full assault mode against the National Labor Relations Board and their actions taken to prevent Boeing from retaliating against striking workers with a hyperbolic rant packed full of lies here.

More on why Coburn isn't telling the truth below the fold, but first, here's a rough transcript of the segment from this Wednesday's Your World With Neil Cavuto on Fox:

CAVUTO: Where does this end? What will this legislation do?

COBURN: Well, it puts NLRB back in the box that they were intended to be by Congress in the first place. What they've done is atrocious, both from a liberty stance point and from a bureaucratic standpoint and also from a capital standpoint. What they've said is that if you're a manufacturer and you're going to expand a manufacturing plant, you can't... you have to expand it where you are and you can't expand it into some place that's a better return on your capital with a more efficient labor force. I mean that's just absolutely asinine in a time when our country needs to be more efficient in our manufacturing.

So, they've way overstepped their bounds. I know why they've done that. It's at union requests and it's a political statement. It's political hardball. But it's stupid from a capital formation standpoint, from an efficiency standpoint and it basically violates the Constitution in terms of liberty and freedom.

You don't have the right to open a plant anywhere in this country you want if that's the best economic condition you can find opening that plant? I mean, that... that's just, you know, it's criminal.

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From GoLefttv: Papantonio: The Republican Assault on Labor Reaches New Lows:

Working America labors under the weakest protections from abusive management in the developed world, by far. We take it as a given that our bosses can fire us for any reason (with a few exceptions like discrimination on the basis of race or gender), or no reason at all -- a notion that would shock and appall working people in most advanced economies. But corporate America doesn't want the very modest protections that do exist in this country to be enforced. Even as companies lay claim to many of the Constitutional rights of citizenship, they want to be held above the rule of law when it comes to their employees.

Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and AlterNet's Joshua Holland discussed Holland's article from this past June while Pap was filling in on the Ed Schultz radio show this week -- Conservatives Fight to Let Corporate Bosses Break Laws Protecting Their Workers:

Working America labors under the weakest protections from abusive management in the developed world, by far. We take it as a given that our bosses can fire us for any reason (with a few exceptions like discrimination on the basis of race or gender), or no reason at all – a notion that would shock and appall working people in most advanced economies.

But corporate America doesn't want the very modest protections that do exist in this country to be enforced. Even as companies lay claim to many of the Constitutional rights of citizenship, they want to be held above the rule of law when it comes to their employees.

This desire lays at the heart of a recent barrage of assaults on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a New Deal agency that for over 75 years has been tasked with enforcing the very modest protections for organized workers afforded by the National Labor Relations Act. The agency, according to former NLRB general counsel Fred Feinstein, “has the stated purpose of encouraging private-sector collective bargaining, protecting employees’ right to form a union to improve working conditions and preventing retaliation for exercising these rights.” He adds that passage of the law “helped the U.S. climb out of the Great Depression and encouraged the growth of a vibrant middle class for much of the last century.”

The primary focus of conservative outrage at the NLRB of late has been its complaint against Boeing for locating a new plant in South Carolina as an explicit act of retaliation against its unionized Washington state workers for going on strike – for exercising a right guaranteed by the law. Read on...

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During the GOP Weekly Response, Senator Lamar Alexander attacked and distorted the National Labor Relations Board's decision to stop Boeing from punishing their workers and moving one of their plants to South Carolina in retribution for a pair of strikes over the last six years.

Here's more from Think Progress on that -- Gov. Haley Defends Boeing’s Union-Busting: ‘It’s Called Capitalism’:

The National Labor Relations Board last week filed a complaint against the airplane manufacturer Boeing, noting that, according to public pronouncements by the company’s officials, the construction of a new plant in South Carolina was intended as retribution against workers in Washington who have engaged in a pair of strikes over the last six years. One senior Boeing official, for instance, said during an interview, “The overriding factor [in moving to South Carolina] was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

Under national labor law, retaliating against workers for striking is illegal union-busting, but several Republican lawmakers have attacked the NLRB and the Obama administration for initiating the complaint. “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). “The Obama administration is now dictating where companies are allowed to create new jobs,” wrote former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN).

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) took to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page today to decry the NLRB’s decision, saying that it circumvents capitalism and falsely claiming that the NLRB “wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state“.

More there so go read the rest.

Alexander went on to tout how wonderful it was that foreign auto manufacturers were coming in and employing people in his state and he blamed the unionized workers rather than management decisions for American auto companies not being able to compete with them.

This weekly response by the GOP seems completely tone deaf to me unless they think that somehow praising foreign companies and calling them "American" auto companies and touting a race to the bottom on wages in this economic environment is going to be a winning message for them in 2012.

Transcript via the LA Times below the fold.

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The Fox News channel needs to get their chryons straight and just put the words union busting tools under the names of Neil Cavuto and Stephen Moore for this segment because that's exactly what they're doing here. If there were ever a couple of apologists out there for big business and them praising the race to the bottom on wages and free trade and anti-unionism, I'd be hard pressed to find some worse examples than these two.

As Media Matters has pointed out, much of our media has been on the attack against the recent ruling from the National Labor Relations Board for their complaint against Boeing. And as they also pointed out in their post, Stephen Moore is talking out of his rear end here with pretending like these allegations are unprecedented.

Experts Say Allegations In NLRB Complaint Against Boeing Represent "Classic Case" Of Labor Law Violations:

Conservative media figures continue to claim that the National Labor Relations Board is attacking states with lax labor laws and engaging in "unprecedented" actions by filing a complaint alleging that Boeing violated federal labor laws in connection with its decision to move the production line for its new 787 Dreamliner to South Carolina. In fact, labor law experts say that if the allegations against Boeing are true, the NLRB has presented a "classic case" of labor law violations. [...]

WSJ's Moore On NLRB Complaint: "We've Never Seen Anything Like That Before ... In The History Of This Country." On Fox News' Your World, host Neil Cavuto claimed that the NLRB complaint against Boeing was "a controversial move by the government telling Boeing where it can and cannot create jobs." The Wall Street Journal's Steve Moore responded by calling the complaint "unprecedented":

CAVUTO: In response to a controversial move by the government telling Boeing where it can and cannot create jobs, a legislative bomb: 34 Republican senators signing on to the Job Protection Act. It's a piece of legislation designed to make sure the government doesn't get into this type of business of telling businesses where to do business.

[...] MOORE: What's really unprecedented, I would say, about this National Labor Relations Board decision is that they're basically telling a company, an American company, you have to stay in the state that you're in. You can't move your facility. And by the way, in this case, in Boeing's case, this is not even an existing facility; it's a new plant that they want to build. The NLRB is basically saying, you know what, you cannot build it in South Carolina. You have to remain in Washington. We've never seen anything like that before that I know of in the history of this country.

Much more there so go read the rest of the post. What's really disgusting about Moore is that he's also regularly brought on CNN and on Bill Maher's show as someone anyone in either audience should take seriously. You can always tell when he knows he's full of it on Maher's show because he starts chuckling uncontrollably and shrugs his shoulders as he makes excuses for his generally untenable positions that always favor his big business backers over those in the working class that he gets paid to shill for.

Think Progress has more on Boeing and their retaliation against their unions here -- Gov. Haley Defends Boeing’s Union-Busting: ‘It’s Called Capitalism’.

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Apparently Lou Dobbs is terribly upset with the National Labor Relations Board's decision to try to stop Boeing from punishing their unions for striking in Washington by moving their jobs to South Carolina, but he loves "free market capitalism" when it comes to Exxon Mobil's ability to rake in record breaking profits.

As the Hill reported -- Exxon posts $10.7B first-quarter profit:

Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. reported a $10.65 billion first-quarter profit Thursday, a 69 percent jump from the same period last year that will likely fuel political battles over U.S. oil-and-gas policy.

The company is benefiting from higher refining margins, but also a surge in the price of oil that has led to $4 per gallon gas prices in the U.S. It's also made oil companies a rich political target for the White House.

Exxon’s profits are its highest since its record in 2008, when it posted profits of $10.9 billion in the first quarter, $11.7 billion in the second quarter and $14.8 billion in the third quarter (and $45 billion for the year). [...]

But the liberal Center for American Progress is holding a call for reporters later Thursday that will take a very different view of the industry earnings.

The group parlayed the profits into a shot at GOP budget plans.

“As the first quarter profits from the big five oil companies roll in, so do the $40 billion in taxpayer subsidies to these already highly lucrative oil companies through the next decade — preserved in Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget by gutting $30 billion from Medicare,” the center said in an advisory previewing the call. Ryan (R-Wis.) chairs the House Budget Committee.

“While Big Oil rakes in windfall profit margins, they do nothing to ease the record-high prices facing American consumers at the pump and slowing our economic recovery,” the group added.

There's that "free market" for ya, subsidized by our tax dollars. Think Progress' Wonk Room has more on the NLRB's complaint -- Gov. Haley Defends Boeing’s Union-Busting: ‘It’s Called Capitalism’:

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