Research

Last Saturday, we told you how President Obama’s recess appointment of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board was a bailout to his union paymasters, with more job-killing bailouts to come. The bailout continued today when the White House Office of Management and Budget issued new guidance that proposes to grow the number of unionized government jobs by broadening the “the definition of jobs that should be performed by government workers instead of private contractors.” Here is the reasoning:

The proposed guidance is built around the general principle that the more critical a function is, the greater the need for internal capability to maintain control of the agency’s mission and operations. This is most obviously the case where the function is critical to achievement of the agency’s core mission, but even for functions that may not be viewed as critical, such as functions that are not directly involved in performing the core mission, the agency may determine that the function is, nonetheless, sensitive enough as to require that many, most, or, in some situations, all positions be filled by federal employees.

Sound like gobbledygook to you? The bottom line is that the Obama administration thinks that a job which may have been filled quite capably by a non-union contractor, often at a lower cost to taxpayers, can suddenly be deemed “critical,” and so must be performed by a unionized government employee.

Unions are getting exactly what they want: more unionized government jobs at the expense of private sector job creation. And with ADP reporting that 23,000 private sector jobs were lost this month, Obama’s agenda to please his union paymasters will only weaken the private sector further.