by Donna Jablonski, Dec 23, 2007

The Bush administration’s National Labor Relations Board has continued its anti-worker, anti-union campaign, ruling that employers can bar workers from sending union-related e-mails at work.

That’s the modern day equivalent of blocking us from talking around the office water cooler or using the break room bulletin board.

As AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt said:

Anyone with e-mail knows this is how employees communicate with each other in today’s workplace. Outrageously, in allowing employers to ban such communications for union purposes, the Bush labor board has again struck at the heart of what the nation’s labor laws were intended to protect—the right of employees to discuss working conditions and other matters of mutual concern.

The Bush labor board’s rulings that suppress the freedom to join unions and bargain with employers—the rights it was established to protect—are receiving increased national criticism. Legal scholars accuse the board of “highly partisan rulings,” the lone Democrat on the board, Wilma Liebman, says the Bush board is “divorced” from the goals and values it is meant to uphold and workers across the country are calling for shutting down the board until it can be replaced by a more pro-worker panel.

The New York Times reports today that the new ruling allows employers to bar union-related e-mail if they also bar workers from sending e-mail for “non-job-related solicitations” for outside organizations—but appears to permit e-mails about organizational activities related to charities. As the Times reports, though:

In many past cases, the labor board ruled that employers engaged in illegal anti-union discrimination if they barred workers from engaging in union-related speech on bulletin boards or telephones when they allowed workers to communicate on bulletin boards or telephones about other matters.

In September, the Bush NLRB issued a sweeping set of decisions that made it harder for workers to join unions, harder for workers to collect back pay if illegally fired and easier for employers to discriminate against union supporters. Last year the board redefined the term “supervisor,” making it easier for employers to bar millions of worker from eligibility for union membership

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