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APRIL 14, 2022
Meyerson on TAP
The Restoration of Workers' Legal Rights Has Begun
A case just put before the NLRB asks it to overturn past anti-worker
rulings.
Another week of the Biden presidency, another advance in the battle to
restore workers' rights and power. On Monday, the National Labor
Relations Board's chief counsel in one of its Southwest regions filed
a brief with the Board asking it to overturn a number of the Board's
key previous rulings that had substantially weakened workers' rights
to form a union. Following the directives that General Counsel Jennifer
Abruzzo has issued since taking that post last summer, Fernando
Anzaldua, of the Board's Phoenix office, asked the Board to rule that
the negligible penalties an administrative law judge had levied against
an employer were insufficient. More importantly-vastly more
importantly-he also asked the board to overturn several decades-old
rulings that had provided the basis for that judge's decisions.
The cases that Anzaldua asked the Board to reverse include
**Sysco Grand Rapids**, in which the Board ruled that even if employer
misconduct obstructed a majority of employees from having their union
recognized, the sheer amount of time that had elapsed between the
Board's determination of misconduct and the initial formation of the
pro-union majority was too long for the Board to order the employer to
recognize the union and begin bargaining. In effect,
**Sysco** has enabled management to avoid recognizing its workers'
union simply by making so many appeals and motions for delay that the
time elapsed would exceed
**Sysco**'s standard.
Following a recent Abruzzo memo, Anzaldua also asked the Board to
overturn its ruling in
**Babcock & Wilcox**, which permitted employers to compel employees to
attend management's anti-union meetings. Anzaldua pointed out that
unions cannot compel employees (or even their own members) to attend
pro-union meetings, creating a double standard on the matter of an
employee's right not to attend meetings or be subjected to either
side's arguments.
Most significantly, following an Abruzzo memo of last September,
Anzaldua asked the Board to reinstate
**Joy Silk**, a Board ruling that was in place from the 1940s through
the 1970s, which required an employer to begin bargaining with a union
that had demonstrated majority worker support unless the company could
demonstrate that in good faith it doubted that majority support.
Beginning not with a Board ruling but with a concession by a Board
lawyer in oral argument before the Supreme Court,
**Joy Silk**had effectively been negated, so that almost no level of
authenticated worker support for unionization and no level of
employer's violation of the law would result in an order from the
Board to recognize the union and enter into bargaining with it.
Anzaldua's brief cites studies showing the astronomical rise in
employers' use of unfair and illegal labor practices and the
precipitous decline in the number of unions' organizing campaigns once
**Joy Silk**was effectively repealed.
Should the Board vote to uphold these arguments, the legal playing field
for employer-employee relations, which has tilted steeply toward
management for the past 50 years, would be considerably evened out.
Anzaldua also cited a Supreme Court ruling noting that the Board is free
to adapt rulings to changed economic and labor-related
circumstances-though it's far from clear, alas, that the current
Supreme Court actually believes that.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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The Return of Michael Barr
Spurned for high-level positions on several occasions, he enters the
conversation for a Fed slot at a time when progressives are wary of more
personnel battles. BY DAVID DAYEN
Blame Police When They Fail Horribly
New York cops bungled their response to a mass shooter. BY RYAN COOPER
Export Financing Subsidies Could Pour Into Fracked Gas
The Export-Import Bank is pledging to help fund renewables and not to
finance stranded assets. Can they help it? BY LEE HARRIS
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