Tuesday afternoon, Bush's National Labor Relations Board invited employers to rob millions of workers of their right to be in a union.
The Bush NLRB decided to reclassify workers with minimal supervisory duties as 'supervisors.' The 'title change' to supervisor doesn't come with a raise or a promotion, just the automatic loss of the right to form a union!
The decision will not only rob nurses, quality control inspectors, retail employees, and many others of the opportunity to form a union in the future, but longtime union members could suddenly lose union representation when their contracts run out. And revoking the right of these individuals to have a union
means the loss of a number of rights and protections on the job.
This is yet another decision by the Bush Board that sides with business, directly against the interests of workers. In the last few years, the Bush-appointed Board has stripped graduate research assistants and disabled employees of their right to form unions. And the administration has been gradually hacking away at our rights to overtime pay, safe jobs, fair pay, health care, and retirement security. Tuesday the agency took Bush's anti-worker agenda to an unprecedented level, revoking the rights of an estimated 8 million workers to form unions and bargain with employers for a better life!
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yes, phillip, you are spot-on in your assessment that the bush-appointed NLRB has only sided with business, and will continue to. the climate in the labor movement with regard to the NLRB is outright fear right now. nobody wants to take ANYTHING to the board, not even charges of employer misconduct, for fear that it will just get batted around in appeals until the bush board eventually rules and creates new precedent.
but smart unions have seen this coming and have abandoned using the NLRB at all. while some unions have relied too heavily on its "protections", unions like SEIU and UNITE HERE have stopped filing charges with the board or even using them for certification elections, preferring to deal directly with employers and use corporate leverage strategies to take them on.
seiu was smart enough to see this charge nurse case coming and was able to get tenent healthcare, their largest union hospital chain, to agree long ago to not reopen the discussion of who is in or out of the bargaining unit. very smart, and will shield them from the chaos this decision will surely bring.
me personally, i am solidly in the "abandon the board" camp. i feel unions are more effective when they can get employers to alter their behavior through threat of economic harm than through threat of symbolic government reprimand.
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