NLRB Continues Attack on Organizing Rights

In yet another attack on workers' organizing rights, the Republican majority members on the National Labor Relations Board ruled that decertification petitions, or an election petition from a rival union, can be filed within a 45-day period of the time an employer grants union recognition to employees based on majority card check.

The decision represents a dramatic, 180-degree shift in Board policy, which, since 1966, had held that a "recognition bar" took effect when union recognition was granted and lasted for one year. The case, decided Sept. 29, involved a challenge to card check elections recognition of United Auto Workers at two auto parts dealers.

Board chairman Robert J. Battista and members Peter C. Schaumber and Peter N. Kirsanow ruled that any post-recognition contract would also not bar an election if the Board's new 45-day time window requirements were not met. "If a valid [decertification or rival union's] petition supported by 30 percent or more of the unit employees is filed within 45 days of the notice," they said, "the petition will be processed." They also said that petition signatures may be obtained before and after the date of recognition.

The Board's two dissenting members, Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh, slammed the majority's decision, charging that the ruling "cuts voluntary recognition off at the knees."

The employer "has little incentive to recognize a union voluntarily if it knows that its decision is subject to second-guessing through a decertification petition," they noted. The Board's "new window period leaves the parties' bargaining relationship open to attack by a minority of employees at the very outset of the relationship, when it is at its most vulnerable."