President Obama hasn’t exactly endeared himself to the labor movement over his unwillingness to push labor’s top legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act.

But on March 27, he did toss a bone to the nation’s unions – and philosophically veered sharply away from his predecessor, George W. bush – by appointing two pro-union attorneys to the National Labor Relations Board. Appointed were Craig Becker, associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union, and Mark Pearce, another long-time union attorney. Obama waited until Congress was in recess to make the appointments. Republican lawmakers had previously blocked Becker’s appointment, objecting to the hiring of such a pro-union figure.

Obama’s Republican nominee to the board, Brian Hayes, was a regular appointment made on March 27, and is still subject to confirmation by the Senate. Recess appointments are temporary, only lasting until the end of 2011. Normal NLRB terms are five years long.

The NLRB is a federal agency that oversees and interprets federal labor law, as well as supervises and conducts union elections. Normally five members, the panel’s majority of Democrats or Republicans depends on the president. But the NLRB has only had two members, one Democrat and one Republican, during the Obama presidency and during part of G.W. Bush’s term, because Congress has not been able to agree on suitable replacements.

Those two NLRB members have been making rulings on cases deemed non-controversial (although the Supreme Court is currently reviewing their authority to do so without a quorum). There is a backlog of some 250 cases awaiting a ruling by the full board.

Predictably, the appointments received strong protests from the business community. Keith Smith, director of employment and labor policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, told Bloomberg, “You will see a radical overhaul of the labor law system.”

Commenting on the recess appointment of Becker and Pearce, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka said the protests by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other big business interests don’t hold water. “No fans of honoring workers’ rights,” he said, the Chamber and Big Business “have been trying to paint Becker and Pearce as biased or radical because they’ve served as union lawyers – without acknowledging that President George W. Bush’s first NLRB appointee was on the staff of the Chamber when he got his nod.”