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Tom Godar

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Tom advises employers on issues such as wage and hour claims, discrimination claims, confidentiality and noncompete agreements, independent contractor relationships, recruiting and retention, policy development, training and discipline. He represents clients before the National Labor Relations Board, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission, and other state and federal administrative agencies.

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It’s become increasingly common for businesses to subcontract workers to perform jobs at a location that is shared with the business or other neutral third parties. When picketing at common job sites shared by the employees of the contractor/employer and the neutral third party, the right of subcontracted employees to engage in collective action at a shared job site must be reconciled with the prohibition on secondary picketing against neutral third parties under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). In Service Employees International Union Local 87 v. NLRB (Service Employees International), the Ninth Circuit held that the Board erred in concluding that picketing constituted unlawful secondary picketing where the picketing activity at a shared job site clearly identified the primary employer as the target of the picketing and did not direct coercive activity against neutral third parties.

hospital building

Hospitals and non-acute care settings beware: Micro-Units are about to make their way back into Healthcare Union organizing. Over the coming months, we can expect to see many significant changes to labor issues affecting healthcare and other sectors of our marketplace. The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) is almost certain to reinstate the standards of what constitutes an appropriate bargaining unit as set forth in a 2011 case, Specialty Healthcare, allowing unions to target smaller groups of employees to organize. This case has encouraged Union organizing of Micro-Units in various settings, especially healthcare. The Board had overruled that decision in 2017, PCC Structurals, Inc., and returned to “community of interest” analysis which reviewed whether the unit employees “share a community of interest sufficiently distinct from the interest of employees excluded from the petition-for group to warrant finding that the purposed group constitutes as separate bargaining unit.”

An analysis of the NLRB General Counsel’s Memorandum

Introduction

On June 6, 2018, the National Labor Relations Board’s (“NLRB”) General Counsel (“GC”) released a memorandum providing guidance on the NLRB’s recent decision in The Boeing Company, 365 NLRB No. 154. When responding to unfair practice charges involving employer handbook rules, the memo provides employers with an easy to follow roadmap to evaluate the legality of employer handbook language and rules.

The United States Supreme Court settled a controversy that had been brewing for half a decade as to whether the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) made enforceable individual agreements to arbitrate employment-related claims in the face of the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) which is seen to protect individuals’ rights to join together and participate in protected “concerted activity” under Section 7 of the NLRA. In a 5-4 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Court found such class or collective action waivers in arbitration agreements to be enforceable and overturned the decision of the Seventh Circuit in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, (7th Cir. 2016), while resolving a split in the Circuits on this issue. With the resolution of this uncertainty, many other employers may consider individual arbitration agreements, waiving class or collective action, for their employees.

Imagine: in a region where hiring and retaining competent employees is becoming increasingly difficult, a multi-national company announces it will build a plant and employ more than 10,000 workers over the next few years. The pressure to get and keep your best employee has just increased, and the ripple effect touches every aspect of this competitive employment situation. Seeking to maintain your competitive position at a time when employees are being wooed to leave, you may want to explore using noncompetition and nonsolicitation agreements, but are they enforceable? What happens when a well-qualified employee applies for an open position, but informs you that she signed a noncompetition, nondisclosure agreement with her current employer? How will that impact your hiring decision?

Earlier this month the United States Supreme Court decided to hear three cases which will resolve the split between various Courts of Appeals (discussed in our prior post here) as to whether individual arbitration agreements barring class arbitration actions in employment-related matters are enforceable. While the Court held in 2011 that the Federal Arbitration Act would allow companies to avoid consumer class actions by insisting upon individual arbitrations in their contracts, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, workers have contended that employment contracts are different. They have successfully argued that the National Labor Relations Act prohibits class waivers since it would impinge upon worker’s rights to engage in “concerted activities”. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals accepted such an argument in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis (discussed in our prior post here), and the Ninth Circuit accepted such an argument in Ernst and Young v. Morris. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the same argument in National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil U.S.A.