On Thursday, President Obama launched into yet another broadside against Republicans over the government shutdown while in campaign mode in Rockville, Maryland speaking to a construction company. Oddly, after veering off teleprompter, he likened Republicans shutting down the government to striking workers shutting down a business: “Everybody here does their job, right? If you’re working here and in the middle of the day you just stopped and said, ‘You know what, I want to get something, but I don’t know exactly what I’m gonna get, but I’m just gonna stop working until I get something, I’m gonna shut down the whole plant until I get something, you’d get fired.”
Except that they wouldn’t. Obama, a constitutional law lecturer at the University of Chicago, apparently forgot about the National Labor Relations Act, which explicitly bars employers from firing striking employees. According to the Department of Labor, “Under the NLRA, it is illegal for your employer to fire, demote, or transfer you, or reduce your hours or change your shift, or otherwise take action against you, or threaten to take any of these actions, because you join or support a union, or because you engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection, or because you choose not to engage in any such activity.”
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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