On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Lisa & Ian Murray wrote:
> power and Clinton has been pretty pro-union in those area, the appointment
> of Bill Gould as chair of the NLRB being a dramatic example.
>
> Surely not the same Bill Gould who denied 8,000 FedEx drivers their UAW and
> Teamster sponsored election petitions before the NLRB after the owner of the
> company dumped 863,000$ in cash in the Republicrats coffers in one day to
> have the drivers classified as working for an airline and Clinton then had
> Frank Raines the budget director send Gould a note to kill the drive?
You must be uninformed (I hope) on the history of this issue, since Gould was the progressive star of this whole issue, who highlighted the fact that FedEx should likely be covered by the NLRA - thereby provoking legislation against Gould's position and exposing FedEx's antiunion hand.
In a 1995 board procedural case, by a 4-1 majority, the NLRB refused to assert jurisdiction over FedEx with the majority arguing that procedurally, FedEx had always been under the Railway Labor Act.
Who was the dissenter? Bill Gould. He wrote:
"Of course, if this were a case in which no reasonable argument could be made against RLA coverage of the petitioned-for employees, there would be no apparent need to involve the NMB in this Board proceeding. We could simply dismiss the petition. Here, however, jurisdiction is not clearthe Board has never given independent consideration to the jurisdictional issue. It ill serves this agency to base a current refusal to address this issue on a past failure to have done so."
In 1996, partly in response to Gould's dissent (he was mentioned by name in the debate), new legislation was passed at the behest of FedEx clarifying specifically that the Board had no jurisdiction over the company. When the petitions came before the Board, Gould concurred in the decision because of that express statutory change in the law. As he wrote in the decision dismissing the union petitions:
"For institutional reasons, I join in the decision of my colleagues to dismiss the instant petition. In my view, Congress has specifically confirmed, with regard to the circumstances of this case, that Federal Express is an express company within the meaning of the Railway Labor Act. A rider to the Federal Aviation Authorization Act of 1996 contained a clarifying amendment restoring the term "express company" to the definition of a "carrier" under the Railway Labor Act. Pub. L. No. 104-264, ' 1223, 110 Stat. 3213, 3287 (1996). "
Are you seriously arguing that Gould as an administrative appointee should have ignored a law passed specifically to force him personally to change his position?
Gould stretched the law and court precedents quite far in favor of unions over the decade, but given the fact that any decision can be overturned by the federal courts, it would be useless to make a decision so completely in defiance of a recently passed statute.
There is little question that Federal Express bought influence with some Democrats, notably Fritz Hollings who undemocratically inserted the amendment into a conference report on the Federal Aviation Authorization Act - thereby avoiding a direct vote on the amendment. But the Democrats led by Ted Kennedy and Paul Simon filibustered the bill for three days, finally losing the filibuster when enough Democrats would not sacrifice the billions of dollars in new aviation funds over the issue. But note that a majority of Democrats still continued to filibuster just on this issue despite the threat of loss of the aviation funds for their districts.
So if you think this issue illustrates that there is no difference between the parties, the actual history illustrates exactly why not having a Democratic majority makes such a difference, since the amendment would never have been passed if the Dems had the majority and control of the conference committees.
Why you felt a need to libel Gould, a person who has been published in NEW POLITICS for gods sake, is beyond me.
-- Nathan Newman