i missed arabic tonight. things got crazy at work so i had to stay late. oddly by staying late, i ended up getting home earlier than usual. neat trick. i guess i will see the whole debates after all.
this has been a hard week at work. my usual policy is to not talk about work here. but i will say this: i lost a case this week.
i've lost plenty of cases before, but this was worse than usual because i lost a case that i had already won. i won it over a year ago before an administrative law judge in a regional office of the NLRB. the law was pretty clearly on our side so the win was not a big surprise, but it still was nice. the company appealed the decision to the NLRB in washington d.c. the NLRB is made up of five members, who are appointed by the president with staggered 5 year terms. about a year ago, for the first time, bush appointees reached the majority. since then the new bush board have been overturning a lot of settled cases to make labor law even more pro-employer.
it finally happened to one of my cases this week. under the old rules, i win, under the new, i lose. actually the opinion did not overturn any of the original cases i relied upon. instead it used pretty tortured logic to distinguish those cases. one of the NLRB agents in the regional office called me yesterday after he heard about the decision and ranted about how absurd the decision was. no argument there. the opinion doesn't even make that much sense.
and so it has come to this. because of the florida recount and bush vs. gore, people who were illegally fired before are now without recourse, grad students and disabled workers can't unionize even if they want to, and i lost one small case that i really should have won.
that's what i'm thinking about when i watch the debates tonight.
