Craig Becker supports illegal alien workers

Over the weekend, President Obama announced 15 recess appointments. The most controversial of these is Craig Becker, a former SEIU lawyer. Becker was already in hot water because of his radical legal writings, including a 1993 piece arguing that workers should be forced to unionize. Now Naked Emperor News has dug up audio of Becker from a radio interview in 2001 voicing strong support for illegal alien workers.

BECKER: "SEIU, the largest union, and many of the other large unions now have a very, very progressive position on immigration and immigration reform, which, of course, unfortunately they didn't have 100 years ago. So it has a very great effect who we represent and who we're trying to represent on the politics of the labor movement."

HOST: "Can you be a little more specific about immigration? What do you mean a progressive policy on immigration"

BECKER "Well I think there's been a recognition that employer sanctions and the effort through punitive sanctions to prevent the hiring of aliens who do not have proper work papers has had a very deleterious effect. It's had a discriminatory effect. It's had a very harsh effect on a class of people who are here, who are going to remain here, who are going to keep coming here because of conditions which simply can't be affected through those kind of punitive sanctions. And then we have to have a different approach."

Becker's position seems to confirm what many have suspected for a long time: Unions are less representative of workers than progressive activists. Illegal aliens are horrible for American labor because they take blue-collar jobs and work for less. But instead of fighting for their members, unions are taking the standard progressive position. Obama has indicated that immigration reform will be his next project. It will be interesting to see which side the labor unions come down on.

Also interesting was Becker's contention that illegal immigration has changed who the unions are "trying to represent". Just how many criminal aliens are in the SEIU and AFL-CIO?

Becker's recess appointment places him on the National Labor Relations Board without a proper Senate vote. There he'll be one of five members who will shape labor relations for years to come.

Big Labor throws a temper tantrum

Oops, the SEIU and the AFL-CIO are pissed off. We all know that BHO has spent much of his first year sucking up to his union cronies. He nominated a radical Secretary of Labor, reduced transparency requirements for labor unions, kicked back huge amounts of stimulus money to the unions, rewrote the laws governing government contracts to give labor ultimate control, tried to ram Card Check legislation through Congress, invited SEIU president Andy Stern to the White House every other week, called off Bush administration-era investigations into union officials, and practically let labor write a compromise on health care reform.

But it's just not enough. After Craig Becker, Obama's nutty nominee for the National Labor Relations Board was rejected by the Senate this week, the unions are blind with rage. John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, bleated, “Here’s labor getting thrown under the bus again. It’s really frustrating for labor, and a lot of union people are thinking: We put out big time in money and volunteers and support. And it seems like the little things that could have been aren’t being done.”

It's almost tempting to defend Barack Obama here. What more does he have to do to satisfy these people? Fortunately, if Big Labor remains petulant and whiny every time they don't get their way, Obama could lose his most potent and evil allies. Without Big Labor's big pockets, Obama would be just another Chicago pol.