Acorn founder Wade Rathke has posted three interesting and insightful posts about the new NLRB election rules, here, here, and here. In his first post he correctly sets out the passage to approval and predicts accurately the legal challenges and time table (years). More after the jump
Although he understates the effect of quicker elections, I think he's close predicting that the time for elections will be reduced from 40 plus days to 15-20. I think he also underestimates the benefit of the changes for labor. In the second post he assesses the new rules in the context of large units, very interesting read for employers. He is correct about the proper response of management, more effort at the initial discovery of union activity, less assessment before acting and a rush to an all out war strategy. This will be the new face of union avoidance - at least by those who understand effective strategy. In an interesting take, Rathke argues unions will have to work hard on pre-election stipulations in order to avoid post election challenges that may delay certification. As this post-election problem sinks in, Rathke in his final post talks about the union maintaining its support by engaging in organizational and protected concerted activities to allow a prolonged post election process to diminish its appeal. This later concern faces the reality that unlike EFC, which would have forced first contracts, there is nothing the NLRB can do by rule making to change the NLRA to force an employer to agree to specific terms in contract negotiation.

"[I] can remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as 'biased' anything that didn't support your world view. If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn't just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn't just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning."

"To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe. I submit that any people thus handicapped sow the seeds of their own decline; they respond to the world as they wish it were rather to the world as it is. That's the story of the Iraq war. But objective reality does not change because you refuse to accept it. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge a wall does not change the fact that it's a wall. And you shouldn't have to hit it to find that out." 

The Times Picayune reports that James O'Keefe, a conservative filmmaker who made surreptitious videos of ACORN employees which went viral, has been arrested as a part of a 4 man scheme to tamper with telephones in Senator Mary Landrieu's Hale Boggs Building offices. O'Keefe reportedly was in town to give a speech to the a libertarian group, Pelican Institute for Public Policy, (scroll down to Events). One of the four men arrested is the son of the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana. The Department of Justice Press Release is here.