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October 6, 2017 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
...U.S. Senate confirms Trump nominees to the NLRB
From Page 1
prosecute allegations that em-
ployers or unions have commit-
ted “unfair labor practices.”
The other part of the agency
is the five-member Board itself,
which functions like a Supreme
Court of labor law cases, issu-
ing rulings that interpret the Na-
tional Labor Relations Act. Un-
der the Act, the president may
appoint up to three members
from his party to this Board. In
practice, that has meant in re-
cent years that the Board has
toggled between pro-labor ma-
jorities under Democratic pres-
idents and pro-business majori-
ties under Republicans.
The National Labor Rela-
tions Act was never a strong
law to begin with. Remedies for
unfair labor practice violations
are minimal, and the process for
prosecuting them is slow.
But for the last eight years,
the NLRB has worked hard to
modernize, and to fulfill the
law’s stated purpose, which is to
encourage collective bargaining.
It’s likely many NLRB deci-
sions that favored workers and
“Mr. Emanuel has every
right to spend his career
representing corporations.
But a guy who has never
even once represented
workers should not serve
on the NLRB. An individual
who has spent his career
working with some of the
most ruthless union bust-
ing firms, fighting off union
efforts at every turn, has ab-
solutely no business at the
helm of an agency whose job is to encourage collective
bargaining.”
— U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)
before the Sept. 25 confirmation vote
unions will now be overturned,
given the background of the
new Trump-appointed majority.
Emanuel was an attorney for
Littler Mendelson, one of the
nation’s top antiunion law
firms.
And as an attorney for a Re-
publican House Committee,
Kaplan drafted legislation to
overturn Obama-era NLRB rul-
ings and make it easier for em-
ployers to fight unionization
campaigns. Before that, in the
George W. Bush-era Depart-
ment of Labor, he drafted newly
onerous union “LM-2” report-
Turn to Page 11
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Date
Average No. Copies
Each Issue During
Actual No. Copies of
Single Issue Published
Preceding 12 Months
A. Total No. Copies (net press run) .............................................................. 51,577
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F. Total Distribution ......................................................................................50,822
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I. Percent Paid
99.75%
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Nearest to Filing
35,113
34,497
216
34,713
0
0
0
125
125
34,838
275
35,113
99.64%
Five pro-worker NLRB reforms that are
now threatened by Trump appointees
■ No more legal delays to union
elections It’s already a stacked deck:
Employers can require workers to
attend anti-union meetings, while
excluding union organizers from the
property. Under those conditions,
delaying a union election gives
employers more time to bust a union
campaign. So employers used legal
technicalities to delay elections. Then in
2015 the NLRB decided it would hold
the elections first, and resolve
employer legal challenges later.
Business groups howled in protest at
what they called the “ambush election”
rule. It used to take 40-45 days to
schedule a union election. Now it takes
an average of 25 days.
■ Joint employers are still
employers Employers sometimes try
to get out of the obligation to bargain
with a union by dividing control
between two entities, like a company
and an outside staffing agency. But in
2015, the NLRB made it clearer that
when two or more businesses share
control over a worker’s terms of
employment, they’re “joint employers”
and still must deal with the union.
■ Grad students can be workers
too Colleges increasingly rely on low-
paid grad students for teaching and
research, while saying they’re students,
not employees. But in 2016 the NLRB
said they can indeed by employees,
and therefore have the right to
unionize.
■ No more employee handbooks
that deny workers rights Even
nonunion workers have rights under
the NLRA, such as the right to talk with
coworkers about conditions, and to
take collective action. To protect those
rights, the NLRB has been cracking
down on employers for employee
handbooks that say workers can’t tell
coworkers how much they’re paid, or
that ask workers to give up their right
to class action suits.
■ Email and Facebook are the new
water cooler If workers have the
right to talk with each other about pay
and conditions, that means they can
talk about them on email or Facebook
too, the NLRB has ruled. So employer
rules barring those things are illegal.