Management Memo

[caption id="attachment_1437" align="alignright" width="98"] Steven M. Swirsky[/caption]

NLRB General Counsel Richard F. Griffin, Jr. has released a General Counsel Memorandum that offers an unusually frank insight into how he intends to use his office for the remainder of his term to pursue what he calls “initiatives and/or priority areas of the law and/or labor policy” to set an agenda to expand the rights of both represented and unrepresented employees and to pare back, substantially in many circumstances, the rights of employers in collective bargaining, responding ...

Steve Swirsky, one of the co-editors of this blog, is featured on Employment Law This Week. He discusses the NLRB's General Counsel memo that outlines the agency's top enforcement priorities for 2016.

The General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board has issued an internal memo that offers employers insight into his office’s initiatives and emphasis this year. The memo describes the types of cases that must be submitted to the Division of Advice for review, rather than decided by the Regional Office where the charge was filed. Among other priorities, the General ...

One of the featured stories in Employment Law This Week is the DOL's publication of its controversial final rule around labor relations consultants.

The so-called “Persuader Rule” requires employers to disclose when they hire a consultant to help fight attempts at unionization. But the rule, as written, is potentially much broader and could require employers to disclose information about a wide range of consultants and others who they rely on for training and communication.

View the episode below or read more about the new rule in an earlier blog post.

Our colleagues Lauri F. Rasnick and Jonathan L. Shapiro, attorneys at Epstein Becker Green, have a post on the Financial Services Employment Law blog that will be of interest to many of our readers: "NLRB Finds a Non-Union Employee’s Foul-Mouthed Complaining About Clients Protected Activity and Slams Employer’s Separation Agreement."

Following is an excerpt:

A recent National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) decision by an Administrative Law Judge (“ALJ”) found numerous violations of the National Labor Relations Act (the “Act”) stemming from the reaction of ...

The US Department of Labor has finally issued its long awaited Final Rule radically reinterpreting the “Advice Exemption” to the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 (“LMRDA.”).  The Final Rule eviscerates any meaningful use of the Advice Exemption, which would be swallowed up by the new expansive definition of persuader activity which could include discussion regarding strategy, reviews of employer drafts and myriad other ways labor attorneys currently aid their clients including essentially any meaningful advice or counsel provided by labor ...

A featured story on Employment Law This Week is the NLRB's crackdown on employers restricting the content of personal emails sent through the employer’s email system.

In 2014, the NLRB ruled that employees who have email through their employers can use that email to communicate about union-related issues. In a recent election at Blommer Chocolate Company, the union claimed that company email rules interfered with the voting process. Employees were allowed to use the company’s email system for personal emails, but were prohibited from expressing personal opinions in their ...

The recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or the “Board”) in Blommer Chocolate Company of California (PDF) addresses one of the issues left open in the wake of the Board’s earlier ruling in Purple Communications, Inc. – namely, the extent to which an employer may regulate the content of its employees’ emails sent over the workplace email system.  In Purple Communications, the Board concluded that an employee who is permitted to use the employer’s email system for non-work purposes is presumptively permitted to use that email system (during ...

One of the questions asked of NLRB General Counsel Richard F. Griffin, Jr. following his presentation at this week’s meeting of the Committee on Developments Under the National Labor Relations Act of the American Bar Association was whether the National Labor Relations Board will follow the EEOC’s lead and adopt a practice of turning employers’ position statements in ULP investigations over to the unions and individuals who have filed the charges.

While his carefully phrased response was that the General Counsel’s office has not made such a decision at this time, most of ...

The top story on Employment Law This Week – Epstein Becker Green’s new video program – explores the push towards unionization of West Coast on-demand drivers.

Drivers for personal transportation company WeDriveU, who drive Facebook employees to and from work, have voted to unionize with the Teamsters. This brings the total to more than 450 shuttle drivers in Silicon Valley who have joined the union in the past twelve months. And last week, Seattle became the first city to give on-demand drivers the right to unionize over pay and working conditions. Hundreds of drivers in the ...

In a decision with ramifications for employers in health, retail, hospitality and other industries serving the public, on October 22, 2015 in a decision, Marina Del Rey Hospital, 363 N.L.R.B. No. 22, 2015 BL 347693, the NLRB confirmed the legality of policies barring employees from the premises when not on duty, which contain an exception permitting off-duty employees to be on the premises as members of the public, e.g., as a patient or a visitor.  The Board found, however, that enforcement of the facially neutral policy to certain employment restrict protected activity constitutes ...