Labor Activists: Workers' Protection Agency Stacked Against Working People

The recent AFL-CIO-led protests against the National Labor Relations Board highlighted dozens of rulings that undermine the rights of people on the job.

The demonstrations, which included more than 1,000 people marching through downtown Washington to NLRB headquarters on Nov. 15 -- and thousands more descending on agency offices in 25 other cities nationwide -- were based on a catalog of heavily anti-worker rulings the labor federation says pervert both the agency's mission and the intent of U.S. labor law.

What the AFL-CIO calls "The September Steamroller" is so bad that the 61 rulings it cited led protesters to demand the board shut down until a new president is elected and names a new board.

The cases run the gamut from making it harder to win back pay from labor law- breaking firms to making it easier for thinly disguised company-run 'decertification" campaigns to throw unions out of workplaces, to letting firms sue unions in retaliation for virtually anything and get away with it, to letting employers threaten workers with dire consequences should they unionize.

"In case after case, these decisions reverse the course" of the National Labor Relations Act, the federation said. The board's Bush-named GOP majority is turning labor law "away from its original purposes of fostering workplace democracy and redressing economic inequality and towards a regulatory regimen that protects employer prerogatives instead of workers."

"This board is resolving the doubts in borderline cases in the wrong direction," the federation quoted former University of Michigan law school dean Theodore St. Antoine as saying. Among the key cases that not only drove the unionists into the streets but also drove the AFL-CIO to file a formal complaint against the Bush board with the International Labour Organization are:

* The Dana and Metaldyne cases, involving the Auto Workers and two firms that voluntarily agreed to recognize UAW at their plants after a majority of all workers signed union election authorization cards--the "card-check" process. Normally, when unions are recognized, they have a year of being free from challenge by dissenters, called "decertification." And decertification needs signatures from only 30% of workers.

The Bush board, by a party-line vote on Sept. 29, said that if the union wins recognition by card-check, the board would send the firm a notice--which the company must post--telling dissenters that if they file a decert petition with enough signatures within 45 days of card-check recognition, it's valid. Then the board holds a decert election. Often, bargaining hasn't even started within 45 days of recognition.

In other rulings that same day, the Bush majority accepted something less than cards--signed slips of paper--as a decertification petition, and said that if an absolute majority of workers signed cards calling for a decertification election, the company could immediately dump the union, without a vote.

* In an 8-year-old case, St. George Warehouse, from Kearney, Neb., the Bush majority reversed more than 40 years of prior rulings--as it did in the UAW cases--and cut the amount of back pay workers are owed once the board finds they were illegally fired. It did so by saying workers must prove they are owed back pay for all the time they were out after the firings--by proving they sought work. The precedents told firms to prove fired workers were not seeking work, in order to cut the back pay.

* In a related case, the Bush board majority also said workers who stalled for two weeks seeking interim work--in hopes the employer would come back to bargaining and settle--would get nothing for those weeks. The board's dissenting Democrats said "requiring this search for 'interim interim' employment is entirely without precedent.'"