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.

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed and remanded a pro-employee Board decision concerning an employee who had been discharged based on the “disparaging content” of the testimony he made before state legislators.

Back in October 2012, a bargaining unit employee of Oncor Electric Delivery Company (Bobby Reed) testified before…

From Justice Kagan’s observation that a decision in favor of the plaintiff could affect millions of public sector workers to Justice Alito’s surprise at seeing a union brief include an argument that the Constitution originally did not grant public employees free speech rights, the U.S. Supreme Court was full of impassioned discourse during Monday’s…

The National Labor Relations Board found that a union committed an unfair labor practice by repeatedly blocking ingress and egress to a hotel for periods of one to four minutes. The opinion provides details about the union’s picketing efforts as a part of an organizing campaign. The blockage occurred during at least ten separate occasions…

As anticipated, the nationwide trend of enacting “right-to-work” (RTW) legislation has continued to grow – in the past few years alone, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and Kentucky have joined the growing list of RTW states. In these states, and the approximately twenty others that have adopted RTW legislation, employers are prohibited from requiring employees…

On December 14, 2017, the National Labor Relations Board (the “NLRB” or the “Board”) overruled Obama-era precedent involving two highly controversial decisions governing employee handbooks and joint employment standards.

Earlier this year, President Trump appointed two Republicans to the five-member NLRB resulting in a 3-2 Republican majority for the first time in a decade.  As anticipated, the new “Trump Board” is beginning to dismantle a series of decisions that many believed to unfairly favor unions.

New Standard Governing Employee Handbooks

In a split 3-2 decision, the Board majority in  . overturned its 2004 Lutheran Heritage standard, which had been used in recent years to render countless employer policies and rules unlawful.  The former standard provided that a policy or rule is unlawful if employees could “reasonably construe” the language to bar them from exercising their rights under the NLRA, such as discussing terms and conditions of employment.  For the past several years, the Lutheran Heritage standard has been heavily criticized for failing to take into account legitimate business justifications associated with employer policies, rules and handbook provisions in addition to yielding unpredictable and sometimes contradictory results.  For example, the standard has deemed unlawful policies that require employees to “work harmoniously” or conduct themselves in a “positive and professional manner.”

It is not unusual on construction sites, where you have a variety of different employers present, that disputes erupt that impact the entire work site. Sometimes this can result in a number of different forms of employee protest and this decision by an Administrative Law Judge, which issued on December 8, 2017, provides a good framework for analyzing what is lawful versus unlawful conduct by an employer in responding to such activity.

Peter Robb, the new General Counsel for the NLRB, issued GC Memo 18-02 on December 1, 2017 that puts the Regional Offices on notice that any “significant legal issues” are to be submitted to Advice. Significant legal issues are defined to “include cases over the last 8 years that overruled precedent and involved one or…