America, What Happened?: Labor Board Loses Sight of Role To Protect Workers’ Rights

The National Labor Relations Board is the lead federal agency charged with upholding the rights of millions of private sector workers. Today, however, "workers face an unprecedented imbalance of power, tilted toward the anti-union employer," said David Bonior, chair of American Rights at Work.

The actions of the NLRB often reflect the political interests of the administration in power. However, this NLRB "has sought to override the law's intent to protect workers in favor of absolving employers of legal responsibility to respect workers' inalienable freedoms of association and free speech," ARAW said in a June report on workers' rights.

The Bush board has frequently taken action behind closed doors without giving the parties an opportunity to be heard, the ARAW report said. In fact, the NLRB has again denied requests from members of Congress and others to take oral testimony in a critical case it will decide on the rights of workers to union representation, the "Kentucky River" case.

Another report issued in July 2006 by Rep. George Miller, leading Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, found that the current Board has denied labor protections for millions of workers. 

The NLRB, stacked with anti-union members, has undermined workers' basic human rights in decisions that denied workers the right to freedom of association and applied double standards to supervisors' conduct, depending on whether that conduct was pro-union or anti-union, the report found. "And the rollback is not over. Several cases are currently pending before the board that pose a danger to workers' rights protections for millions of American workers" and to voluntary union recognition, the report warned. 

Pending decisions include the "Kentucky River" case that could strip away the union rights of registered nurses and other workers who are not supervisors but sometimes direct other employees in some of their duties, affecting more than 8 million workers. 

In another case, the NLRB is reviewing card check recognition, which enables workers to make a fair choice about union representation in the workplace. Card check is a key part of the Employee Free Choice Act, which provides for union recognition based on support from a majority of workers and first contract arbitration, if necessary. The bill has 216 House co-sponsors and 44 Senate co-sponsors.

"The Employee Free Choice Act levels the playing field and ensures that the law does a better job of protecting workers' fundamental rights to organize and bargain with their employer," said Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the bill's sponsor.

One way the current board denies workers' rights is to limit the remedies for an employer's violation of the law. Former Verizon Wireless workers in Orangeburg, N.Y, know this all too well. In December 2005, an NLRB administrative law judge found that a worker was wrongly disciplined in 2003 because of his support for CWA. The penalty for Verizon Wireless? The company was required to post a notice that it broke the law and would not do so again at its facility in Wilmington, N.C., where it moved the work after it shut down the Orangeburg center. And since that decision continues to be appealed, the worker hasn't received any of the benefits he lost because of the illegal discipline.   

The current board is "pressing the outer limits of what could be a reasonable or legitimate interpretation of the balance between employer prerogatives and worker rights. In my mind, this is fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act, which is to encourage the practice and procedures of collective bargaining," said Cornell University Professor James A. Gross.