A federal judge in Oklahoma June 5 upheld the central provisions of the state's newly adopted right-to-work law, which guarantees Oklahoma workers the right to choose whether to pay union dues. Oklahoma voters approved the constitutional amendment on Sept. 25, 2001. In November, seven unions and a pipeline services company in the state filed a federal lawsuit, claiming that certain provisions of the amendment were preempted by federal labor law, and that the whole statute should be thrown out. (Local 514, Transport Workers Union v. Keating, E.D. Okla., No. CIV-01-633-S, 6/5/02).
However, Judge Frank H. Seay (E.D. Okla., Carter) held that while the Right to Work law cannot be enforced with regard to the limited number of employees laboring under the Railway Labor Act, the law clearly and constitutionally applies to employees who work for private companies under the National Labor Relations Act. The vast majority of Oklahoma employees fall under the NLRA's jurisdiction, and are thus protected by the Right to Work law. Clarifying the limits of the Right to Work law's jurisdiction, Judge Seay upheld the remaining portions of the law.
Republican objections to 
A union normally is about the last place anyone would look to find someone pressuring the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to more aggressively scrutinize union financial reporting. Yet a member of a public employee local in Maryland is doing just that. And he's gone to court, too. Meet Chris Mosquera, a member of Local 1994 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents municipal and county government workers in suburban Montgomery County, Md. This May, Mosquera 
Like any cabinet-level agency, the U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration has its share of political cronies. And the department has given more than a few indications that it intends to remake DOL into a vehicle for union advocacy. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW) for the past year has sought the full story. It's one of the less publicized aspects of the apparent lack of accountability in the current administration. This past December, attorneys for the Springfield, Va.-based foundation 
If transparency is one of the Obama administration's highest orders of business, it hasn't made much of an appearance at the Department of Labor (DOL). On January 20, immediately following the inauguration ceremony, President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, issued a memorandum advising federal agencies to extend by 60 days the effective date of all regulations not yet published in the Federal Register. That gave the DOL under Secretary Hilda Solis exactly the wiggle room it needed to rescind new requirements to the annual financial reporting form for larger unions, LM-2, finalized during the waning days of the Bush administration.
