The Trump National Labor Relations Board (Board or NLRB) gifted employers a significant win on the eve of the Christmas holiday with its December 23 decision in United Parcel Service, Inc., 369 NLRB No. 1 (UPS), which announced a return to the decades-old standard for deferring to arbitral decisions in unfair labor practice cases alleging discharge or discipline in violation of Section 8(a)(1) and (3) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act).…

The Trump National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) continues to reshape the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act) with new decisions that reverse precedents and undo legal restrictions placed on employers during the Obama administration. Over the past week alone and coming on the heels of the current Board’s issuance of new more employer friendly election regulations, the Board issued three important cases that warrant management’s attention. What follows is a brief summary of these…

On the eve of the holidays, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) delivered an early Christmas present to employers with its issuance of new regulations governing the NLRB election process.  While not scraping the Obama Board’s controversial 2014 election regulations wholesale, the current Board’s new rules moderate the election processing time frames considerably, allow employers to raise issues of supervisory status before an election is held and give employers a greater opportunity to campaign amongst…

While bargaining, unions often demand that employers produce information relevant to the bargaining process so that the union may fulfill its duties as bargaining representative. Under the law and absent some compelling reason for not doing so, NLRA Section 8(a)(5) compels employers to produce such relevant bargaining information. This informational duty is particularly unctuous for employers who have fallen on hard economic times for where an employer claims a financial inability to meet a union’s…

A flurry of critical cases have issued out of the NLRB over the past two weeks. The latest is the Board’s decision in MV Transportation, 368 NLRB No. 66 (2019), and the Board’s decision provides critical cover to employers seeking to make changes to working conditions without first bargaining with an incumbent union. By way of background, the NLRA requires employers and unions to bargain in good faith with respect to wages, hours and…

It is lawful to discipline and even discharge an employee for making inappropriate or offensive remarks in the workplace. Indeed, current anti-harassment and anti-bullying laws may require an employer to take adverse action against a worker for their use of such “bad” language. However, when those remarks are made while an employee is engaged in union or other protected concerted activity (PCA), then, depending upon the employee’s remarks and the context in which they are…

In the organizing context, the scope of a potential bargaining unit is everything-it determines which employees’ votes will count towards establishing a union’s putative majority in a secret ballot election, and determines the unit within which bargaining must take place if a union prevails in that election. Unsurprisingly, then, unit scope is one of the most hotly contested issues in election cases.…