It's A Bad Time To Be A Union Buster

Gwynne Wilcox is back on the NLRB.

Source: YouTube

On Wednesday, the US Senate voted 51-48 to confirm a second term for Gwynne Wilcox on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) — with Alaska Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan voting for her and West Virginia’s ever-whimsical Democratic Senator Joe Manchin voting against. Manchin was also the only Democrat to vote against giving rail workers seven paid sick days a year.

Her confirmation restores the 3-1 advantage Democrats have on the panel. Normally, there are supposed to be five members, three from the party currently in power and two from the party that isn’t, but the Biden administration is not exactly chomping at the bit to get another Republican up there. Several groups, including the US Chamber of Commerce, were quite miffed about this and felt that the Senate should wait to confirm Wilcox until Biden nominated a Republican to fill the empty seat. You know, for “balance.” Godforbid there aren’t two people on the panel fighting for the big guy.

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This means that the NLRB will be able to continue on its merry way, finding in favor of workers over their union-busting employers. In late August, in its decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC and International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the board restored some aspects of the Joy Silk doctrine, which required employers to voluntarily acknowledge and bargain with a union if workers were able to demonstrate that it was what a majority of them wanted — what it means when you hear people refer to as “card check” — unless they had some proof that this evidence was tainted in some way, in which case they could ask the NLRB for an official vote. It also meant that any unfair labor practices on the part of the employer were considered an admission that the majority of workers wanted a union and would automatically require the employer to recognize the union. In 1971, the NLRB changed it so the workers had to prove that the employer’s unfair labor practices and union busting were so bad as to render it impossible to hold a fair election. Unsurprisingly, the NLRB’s abandonment of Joy Silk in 1971 was one of the major contributing factors to the decline of unions in the United States.

Under Cemex, when a majority of workers sign union cards, the employer has two weeks to either recognize the union or request that the NLRB hold an official vote to determine that a majority of employees actually do wish to negotiate as a union. If the employer is found to engage in any unfair labor practices, however, the union will be automatically recognized as it will be considered an admission on their part that a majority of workers want to unionize.

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It’s not exactly Joy Silk, but it’s close and it will make it a whole lot easier for workers to organize and a lot less easy for employers to thwart those efforts with union-busting nonsense.

In other exciting labor news this week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul (I know, right?) has signed a bill that will make it illegal for companies to punish workers who refuse to attend “captive audience” meetings, in which they are forced to listen to their employers’ political or religious views or risk losing their job. These meetings have long been a popular union-busting tactic, with employers paying tens of thousands of dollars to union-busting firms that come to workplaces to tell workers how great they have it and how the company will probably implode if they start a union and their boss has to pay them fairly.

“This legislation will help to ensure that all New Yorkers receive the benefits and protections that allow them to work with dignity,” Governor Hochul said in a statement on Wednesday. “My administration is committed to making our state the most worker-friendly state in the nation, and I thank the bill sponsors for their partnership in our mission to establish the strongest and most robust protections right here in New York.”

Putting an end to these meetings nationwide has been, along with bringing Joy Silk back, a major priority for NLRB leader Jennifer Abruzzo, and with the current Democratic majority on the board, there’s a good chance she’ll get it.