The Anti-Labor Labor Board

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Good article here.
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The Anti-Labor Labor Board
Dmitri Iglitzin and Steven Hill
December 20, 2006

Dmitri Iglitzin is a labor law attorney in Seattle and a lecturer at the University of Washington Law School. Steven Hill is political reform director at the New America Foundation and author of 10 Steps to Repair American Democracy.

With the Democratic Party regaining control of Congress for the first time since 1994, Democratic leaders should look to undo the effects the Bush administration has had on American workers. But that won't be easy, because one institution that remains solidly in Republican and anti-worker hands is the National Labor Relations Board, the country's chief arbiter of labor disputes.

Although nominally a quasi-judicial entity appointed by the president and empowered to adjudicate labor disputes, the NLRB actually sets the rules that govern those disputes and thereby exerts an enormous influence over who prevails. In case after case over the last several years, the Republican-dominated board has taken positions that have hurt American workers.

In one recent case, the Oakwood Healthcare decision, the board found (by its usual 3 to 2 Republican majority) that a group of Michigan nurses are excluded from the protection of the nation's most important labor laws on the spurious grounds that they are "supervisors," not employees. In one stroke, these worker—and potentially tens of thousands of others—lost the right to be in a union and to advocate collectively for workplace improvements.

The same September day as the Oakwood decision, the board also cut back on the right of employees to wear union buttons at work. That case arose out of a dispute in San Diego at the W Hotel, which, according to its owner, the Starwood Hotels & Resorts chain, seeks to give its guests a "wonderland" hotel experience where they get "whatever they want, whenever they want it." For its employees, however—mostly low-paid Latino laborers—the hotel is no wonderland. Some wore buttons bearing four words—"Justice Now! Justicia Ahora!"—and the name of their union. The W demanded workers take them off.

MORE:
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/12/20/the_antilabor_labor_board.php

[mdmc]

1. nlrb is the worst thing for working people in America