Working Families Take Action on Anti-Worker Labor Board Ruling

by James Parks, Oct 4, 2006

Don’t let Big Business fool you. Even though the U.S. Chamber of Congress says the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB’s) decision announced yesterday isn’t a big deal for workers, the truth is the decision easily could bar millions of workers from joining unions. Working people already are taking action to protest the ruling and demand action from Congress.

The NLRB ruled on three cases, collectively known as Kentucky River, but it’s the lead case, Oakwood Healthcare Inc. that creates a new definition of supervisor. Although the Oakwood decision covers only nurses, the expanded definition of supervisors means up to 8 million workers, including nurses, building trades workers, newspaper and television employees and others may be barred from joining unions. In Oakwood, the board agreed with the employer that charge nurses are supervisors. But the ruling also sets broad definitions for determining who is a supervisor that invites employers to classify nurses and many low-level employees with minor authority as supervisors. The decision was issued Sept. 29 but not released until Oct. 3.

Working families and the AFL-CIO are calling for Congress to act to reverse the NLRB rulings. Click here to tell your members of Congress the Bush administration has gone too far and you will hold them accountable for how they respond.

In the Oakwood case, some 220 registered nurses at Heritage, an acute-care hospital in Taylor, Mich., voted in a UAW election in February 2002. The NLRB impounded the votes because the hospital, owned by Oakwood, claimed the RNs are supervisors. The ballots have remained impounded and the results of the election unknown pending this decision.

UAW Vice President James Settles, who directs bargaining activities for UAW nursing  members, issued a call to action:

We’re going to support our members who are nurses and work in other occupations, to ensure their jobs are not arbitrarily redefined. We’ll also continue to organize, bargain and pursue political action to expand, rather than restrict, the rights of American employees.

United American Nurses (UAN) President Cheryl Johnson calls the decision a “threat to patient advocacy and care.”

The decision shows an incredible lack of understanding by the majority of the NLRB as to what nurses actually do and how hospitals work. Every day, nurses make decisions about patients’ care. That’s not only our job; it is required by our code of ethics and our standard professional practice. Some of the decisions we make involve directing other staff, but that doesn’t mean nurses are sudenly transformed into supervisors.

The bottom line is that this Bush NLRB has already taken away the freedom of millions of workers to join a union. As Nathan Newman writes:

To put this denial of labor rights in perspective, 32 million workers or 25 percent of the workforce already have no right to form a union under federal, state or local law (see this GAO report and this ARAW summary).

The 32 million include 16.6 million supervisors (8 million new supervisors from the Oakwood decision, plus traditional 8.6 million now excluded), 3 million agriculturtal workers, 1 million domestic workers, 7 million independent contractors, 10 million managers, 500,000 employees of religious institutions. Also, as Newman notes, millions of public employees are excluded from labor law protections and depend on state law for whether they have any labor rights.

And, on top of that, Newman adds:

Beyond the official numbers excluded, in practice, the millions of undocumented workers in the country have no labor rights since when they seek to for form unions, they can be fired at will by employers without financial penalty under the Hoffman Plastics decision by the Supreme Court.

Human Rights Watch has analyzed these exclusions as violations of international human rights laws covering labor rights.

The NLRB’s decision has long-term implications for the future of workers’ ability to form unions to get a voice at the workplace. In their dissent, NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh say the decision “threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law—workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.” Liebman and Walsh wrote that most professionals and other workers could fall under the new definition of supervisor, “who by 2012 could number almost 34 million, accounting for 23.3 percent of the workforce.”

The decision goes way beyond what Congress intended when it wrote the nation’s labor laws, as Jordan Barab points out:

…even the anti-union authors of the Taft-Hartley Act [which restricted some workers’ freedom to join a union] made it clear that it did not intend to deny coverage to professional employees, lead workers or others whose jobs do not include major managerial responsibility to hire, fire and discipline other employees. Yet, the Republican-appointed majority [of the NLRB] today ignored that context, essentially finding favorable definitions in the dictionary, rather than from clear Congressional intent.

Of course for this administration, simple legalities are not the issue; crushing labor unions is.

The 11 unions comprising the AFL-CIO’s RNs Working Together will be actively encouraging hospitals and other health care facilities to allow nurses to choose for themselves whether they want to be members of a union. Says Candice Owley, RN, chair of AFT Healthcare:

Hospitals don’t have to, and shouldn’t, take the bait from the NLRB and deny nurses the right to union protection.

California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro says the group will join protests or other public events with registered nurses Oct. 5 in Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Ky., and Bangor, Maine, as a beginning wave of actions in response to the decision. More than 30,000 CNA/NNOC members already have signed pledges to strike if the employer seeks to exploit the Oakwood ruling to deny their freedom to join a union.

Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen says the decision is ”just the latest in a series of devastating actions by the NLRB to strip away workers’ rights.”

USW International Union (USW) President Leo Gerard says this is just another effort by the Bush administration to wipe out unions and it’s time to fight back:

The collective bargaining rights of millions of workers, who up until
now were assumed by all to have the right to form a union, are now in
jeopardy. This is the result of a political decision by an overly-politicized Supreme Court and NLRB to undercut the right of workers, which has existed unabated now for 70 years. What is left to our union members is a political challenge to immediately fight back by encouraging voters in this November’s mid-term election to hold accountable those legislators who helped to give us this pro-corporate Supreme Court and Board.

International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) President Gregory Junemann says it’s an outrage the NLRB decided a case with such massive ramifications without once holding oral hearings:

This decision by the National Labor Relations Board is just one of many unilateral actions taken by strategically-placed Bush Administration ideologues aimed at gutting the unionization and employee protections of American workers. The fact that the NLRB refused to even hear oral arguments on the Kentucky River matter is proof enough that there was no real desire to make an impartial ruling.

The decisions will have a powerful impact on Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, according to Maria Somma, president of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), one of the AFL-CIO’s six constituency groups:

Our numbers in unions have increased for two years in a row because of the many successes in organizing workers in industries such as health care. This ruling cuts off a crucial pathway to economic justice for Asian and Pacific Islander American workers. The right to form unions is a basic human right recognized around the world. It’s an outrage that it is not being recognized right here in America.

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