News Briefs
Demonstrators demand shutdown of NLRB
Dec 6, 2007 4:45 PM
Some 1,000 sodden demonstrators slogged in the rain last November to the headquarters of the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C., to demand it shut up and shut down for renovation. Created in 1935 by the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act to regulate management-labor relations, the board under the Bush administration is systematically destroying the right of employees to bargain with their bosses, demonstrators said. In September alone, the Bush board issued 61 decisions weakening workers’ rights.
Among the September rulings, notes columnist Harold Meyerson: a Sept. 11 ruling in the case of 44 longtime employees whom a Florida resort illegally fired over a back pay dispute. While all but one worker found new employment within three months of being fired, the board denied their claim of full back pay, saying the picketers should have abandoned their picketing as soon as they were fired and gone on a job search instead. Ruling for the strikers “would be to reward idleness,” the board majority said.
Later that month, the NLRB overturned a card-check victory, saying that even after a union was certified through card check, the employer must post a notice telling employees that if 30 percent of them sign a petition saying they don’t want a union, the 50 percent-plus-one of them that do are overruled and a board election must be held. The Bush appointees argued that card-check isn’t a good measure of worker sentiment since those employees who sign cards and petitions may be susceptible to “group pressure.”
But in a nursing home case the same day, the board ruled that if a majority of workers signed cards or petitions asking for a vote to remove the union, the employer could decertify the union then and there without even holding that vote. “Signed petitions from workers, in other words, are suspect when the workers want a union and proof positive when they don’t,” Meyerson wrote.
Washington Post, Nov. 21
AFT LeaderNet, Nov. 15
