NLRB to Workers: "You Lose."

October 04, 2006

The folks who brought us Enron, record tax cuts for millionaires, a minimum wage stuck at $5.15 (and numerous other outrages), raised the bar on their contempt of working people to new heights. The Bush appointed and Republican dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), in a party-line vote, gave employers broad new powers to reclassify workers as supervisors — denying them the right to join a union. The NLRB — which we now know stands for the “National League of Republican Businessmen” — ruled on three cases, known collectively as “Kentucky River,” that will turn back the clock on working professionals, especially nurses. A worker who spends as little as 10% of his or her time directing other workers and has no promoting, hiring or firing power, can now be classified a supervisor, and therefore be made exempt for being part of a union. This decision is nothing but another bald face assault, and is part of the Bush Administration’s concerted efforts to undermine the rights and protections of working people and to dismantle labor unions and thus any semblance of an American middle class. According to AFSCME President Gerald W. McEntee, the decisions “irreparably change the landscape of the American workplace by giving private-sector employers a license to deprive millions of workers of their freedom to form a union.” Said United Nurses Associations of California/UHCP/AFSCME member Scott Byington, R.N., “This is not just an attack on nursing, it’s an attack on health care. If nurses can’t speak up, there is no one to speak for patients.” In their dissent, NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh say the decision “threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law—workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.” Liebman and Walsh wrote that most professionals and other workers could fall under the new definition of supervisor, “who by 2012 could number almost 34 million, accounting for 23.3% of the workforce.” AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said, “It is a sad day for every American who works to put food on the table and gas in their cars, when the rights they count on can be cynically eviscerated by a Labor Board that is informed more by political ideology than sound legal analysis.” Vowed, McEntee, “This decision is an outrage, and workers across the country are mobilizing for this fall’s elections to elect leaders who will hold future appointees to the NLRB to a higher standard.”