After the National Right to Work Foundation filed comments in January in support of policies to protect workers, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued its final rule eliminating some barriers that prevented workers from being able to decertify a union they oppose.<\/p>\n
Late last year, National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix wrote in the Wall Street Journal encouraging the NLRB to remove such barriers for workers by highlighting actual examples of how these types of NLRB rules hurt men and women across the country:<\/p>\n
A variety of other nonstatutory policies, doctrines and \u201cbars\u201d prevent workers from holding votes to oust unions they oppose. In many cases, the policies are applied one after the other, blocking escape routes.<\/p>\n
A majority of workers at a Wisconsin trucking company experienced this over the past two years. First, they were blocked from removing their union by the so-called voluntary-recognition bar. This stops workers from decertifying a union for up to a year after the union is installed through \u201ccard check\u201d\u2014a procedure that avoids the need for a secret ballot and makes workers vulnerable to union intimidation.<\/p>\n
Then, after waiting a year for that bar to expire, the Wisconsin workers found they had been merged by Teamsters officials into a multicompany nationwide bargaining unit of about 24,000 workers. Suddenly the petition to oust the local union was 7,000 signatures short\u2014for a workplace with fewer than 10 union workers. Last month the NLRB declined the Wisconsin workers\u2019 appeal, though a majority of voting board members signaled they would revisit the \u201cmerger doctrine\u201d policy in the future.<\/p>\n
Mix went on to discuss more of the bureaucratically-created policies, including the recently eliminated \u201cblocking charge\u201d policy, that allow union bosses to prevent workers from choosing who represents them:<\/p>\n
Other workers face other hurdles: The \u201csettlement bar\u201d blocks a decertification vote because of an NLRB settlement to which the workers weren\u2019t a party; the \u201csuccessor bar\u201d blocks a vote for up to a year after a company is acquired; the \u201ccontract bar\u201d blocks a vote for up to three years after a union contract is forged; and a \u201cblocking charge\u201d blocks a vote while union allegations against a company are pending. None of these are required by law.<\/p>\n
The NLRB is addressing the voluntary-recognition bar and blocking charges through the current rule-making process, but the other policies are similarly destructive of workers\u2019 legal right to vote out a union that lacks majority backing. Congress should act to protect workers from being trapped in union ranks they oppose, but in the meantime the NLRB has the authority to eliminate these barriers.<\/p>\n
After the Foundation\u2019s comments and vocal support, the NLRB has finally removed the \u201cblocking charge\u201d and \u201cvoluntary recognition bar\u201d rules, but there is more work to be done to protect workers and remove barriers.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"