has mounted an aggressive campaign to curtail workers’ rights under the statute.

In a letter submitted to the joint House-Senate hearing last week that examined the NLRB’s war on workers, James Brudney of the Ohio State University Moritz School of Law and Cynthia Estlund of the New York University School of Law were joined by 56 additional labor law professors from our nation’s most prestigious schools.

They say the NLRB’s recent decisions

reflect an ominous new direction for American labor law. By overturning precedent and establishing new rules…the board has regularly denied or impaired the very statutory rights it is charged with protecting—the rights of employees to join and form unions and to engage in collective bargaining.

They also say the NLRB’s “highly partisan” rulings have stripped away many worker protections in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), weakened the “already inadequate remedies” for workers and are

remarkable for their anti-union bias, and in that regard remarkably out of touch with the desires of American workers. A recent Hart Research poll shows that as many as 60 million workers want a union but do not have one.

 

The current board has given employers even greater leeway during organizing campaigns—to threaten and intimidate workers for union activities and to impose onerous and ambiguous workplace rules that deter union support and chill workers’ exercise of their rights.

The labor law professors say that because the board refuses to “protect genuine employee free choice,” many workers have turned to trying to secure voluntary recognition through majority sign-up (or card-check). In those instances an employer agrees to recognize the workers’ choice to join a union after a majority sign union authorization cards. It is a process, the attorneys say, the NLRB, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court have endorsed for decades. Majority sign-up is also a key element of the Employee Free Choice Act.

In response to the increasing reliance on majority sign-up by workers who want a union, the current board majority has erected substantial new hurdles to voluntary recognition…But the board has now made clear that it will not protect new bargaining relationships created through majority sign-up and voluntary recognition until a minority of workers who oppose the union have a second chance to defeat the majority’s choice of union representation.

 

Indeed, the board now insists that employers who voluntarily recognize their workers’ free and uncoerced majority choice for a union must post an NLRB notice telling workers how 30 percent of them may force the union to demonstrate majority support a second time. In stark contrast, the board does not require any employer-posted notice that explains to workers how to exercise their rights to form, join, or organize a union for the purpose of engaging in collective bargaining.

The laws professors also point out how the Bush NLRB has weakened penalties for employer misconduct and diluted remedies for workers seeking to recover back pay if they are fired illegally for their union activities. They say congressional action is needed to put a stop to the Bush NLRB’s assault on workers’ rights:

The board’s persistent efforts to undermine NLRA protections also have dramatized the need for Congress to enact serious labor law reform after nearly half a century with no substantial legislative change.