Sen. King should oppose McFerran nomination

The case against Lauren McFerran’s renomination as chair of the National Labor Relations Board is quite strong. Her tenure on the board has been marred by partisanship, pro-union bias and credible accusations of mismanagement. Sen. Angus King should oppose her nomination in the U.S. Senate.

The Wall Street Journal has written that under McFerran, “the agency has shed any veneer of fairness during her tenure, trampling the rights of small and large businesses. A series of rulings since 2021 have stretched the protections in labor law wide enough to make workers virtually unfireable, as long as they belong to a union or wish to join one.”

In a particularly egregious example, McFerran’s NLRB ruled that unions and their allies could harass workers with racists and sexist personal attacks and that employers could not terminate them as a result.

In another blackeye for the agency, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) determined that under McFerran, the NLRB committed “gross mismanagement” during a union election in a way that assisted the union, and displayed unwillingness to work or cooperate with the OIG investigation.

McFerran’s tenure runs through December. So why did President Joe Biden renominate her so prematurely? A cynic would believe that the president is attempting to pack the NLRB with party loyalists.  

I am concerned that if McFerran is allowed to remain the chair of the NLRB for another term, it could permanently tilt the balance in favor of Big Labor, at the expense of small employers and Maine workers. I believe the NLRB should return to its original charge: to serve as a neutral referee between management and labor, always looking out for the workers.

I hope Sen. King agrees with me and votes against the McFerran nomination.

Kerri Bickford,
Topsham Maine

Urging L.L.Bean to divest from fossil fuels

L.L.Bean promotes itself as an advocate of the great outdoors touting their annual contributions to the National Park Service and to The Nature Conservancy. But another perspective is sung by Marcia Taylor of Third Act Maine: “L.L.Bean ain’t so green./Let me tell you what I mean./It’s their Citibank credit card:/Cut it up-it won’t be hard./More drilling and fracking,/that’s what your Bean Bucks buy./To be a REAL ‘outsider’,/Tell Citibank good-bye!”

Yes, the “inconvenient truth” is that the “Bean Bucks” credit card is aligned with Citibank, which continues to finance new fossil fuel projects to the tune of $332 billion since the Paris Climate Accords of 2015.

Science tells us that we are in a climate emergency. Knowing that, we need to rapidly transition to a carbon-free economy if we are to have any chance of keeping this earth livable.

L.L.Bean could burnish and bolster their reputation of being good stewards of the environment by enlisting other companies aligned with Citibank, such as Costco, into a Coalition of Concerned Corporate Citizens. Together, they could use their combined economic influence to encourage Citibank to divest from new fossil fuel projects and invest in a renewable energy future.

L.L.Bean has an opportunity to do the right thing and be on the right side of the climate crisis, otherwise their contributions to parks and public lands are just so much greenwashing.

William Rixon,
Freeport