Free Republic

*** Here's another one that can fit right into the Make America Great restoration: Requiring unions to recertify with the workers they purport to represent.Sean Higgins, a former colleague at Investor's Business Daily, now at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a great new piece on just how badly this cleanup is needed.He begins it this way: Imagine if you lived in a country where a vote held decades previous determined which party held control of the government and people had little to no say over who ran the party. That’s the situation many workers must deal with if they’re unionized....

National Labor Relations Board Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter ordered Starbucks to reopen “within a reasonable period of time” two Ithaca locations that closed after employees formed a union, stating that its move to “chill unionism” violated the National Labor Relations Act. Carter ruled on Friday that the May 2023 permanent closures of the Ithaca Commons and Meadow Street Starbucks locations and failure to bargain with the union were unlawful, as the board found the stores were closed for “antiunion reasons” and in an effort to quell unionizations elsewhere. The NLRB similarly ordered on July 6, 2023, that the third...

Amazon is challenging the structure of the National Labor Relations Board in a lawsuit that also accuses the agency of improperly influencing the outcome of a union election at a company warehouse more than two years ago. The complaint, filed Thursday at a federal court in San Antonio, mirrors legal arguments the tech giant made in front of the agency earlier this year after NLRB prosecutors accused the company of maintaining policies that made it challenging for workers to organize and retaliating against some who did so. In the new legal filing, attorneys for Amazon pointed back to a lawsuit...

"But, the reasonable-cause standard goes far beyond simply fine tuning the traditional criteria to the §10( j) context—it substantively lowers the bar for securing a preliminary injunction by requiring courts to yield to the Board’s preliminary view of the facts, law, and equities."

Democrats hate the gig economy, since they can’t force independent contractors to join unions (and thus rake off their union dues). So Biden’s NLRB issued a “joint-employer standard” to force companies to treat gig employees and subcontractors as subject to union representation. Well, a federal judge in Texas squashed that rule. Last week, a federal judge in Texas issued a ruling that struck down a new joint-employer standard by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that would have classified numerous companies as “employers” of specific contract and franchise employees, obligating them to negotiate with unions representing those workers. U.S....

As we all have seen, corporate America has become militantly pro-LGBT and anti-Christian over the past few decades.... James Earls has worked at UPS for 35 years and is a devout Christian. He has received some of UPS’s highest awards for safety and loyalty. He is a driver of a large UPS “feeder truck.” He lives in Alabama and is represented by Teamsters Local 402. .. During the celebration of Gay Pride Month a few years ago, James entered the UPS facility in Madison, Alabama. UPS was showing its support and dedication to the LGBT movement by broadcasting images on...

Rocket and satellite maker SpaceX on Thursday sued a U.S. labor board to block its case accusing the company of illegally firing employees who sent a letter to company executives calling CEO Elon Musk “a distraction and embarrassment.” SpaceX in the lawsuit filed in Brownsville, Texas federal court claims the structure of the National Labor Relations Board(NLRB), which issued a complaint against the company on Wednesday, violates the U.S. Constitution. The NLRB alleges SpaceX violated federal labor law by firing eight workers in 2022 for signing onto the letter, which accused Musk of making sexist comments that went against company...

Newly introduced legislation would significantly limit the power of the National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency that currently holds broad sway over businesses, including small businesses. Critics say the agency, which aims to help private sector workers, has become highly politicized, doing the bidding of labor unions that are working with the Democratic party as small businesses pay the price. U.S. Rep. Bob Good, R-Va., introduced the “Small Businesses Before Bureaucrats Act” this week. In 1958, Congress set standards for which businesses the NLRB had jurisdiction over, which includes any retail business with annual revenue topping $500,000 and...

Companies can no longer offer severance agreements that prevent employees from making disparaging remarks about their former employer, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday. The big picture: The federal agency said these agreements require employees to waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act, and that such policies are a violation of the act. According to the NLRB, "the employer’s offer is itself an attempt to deter employees from exercising their statutory rights, at a time when employees may feel they must give up their rights in order to get the benefits provided in the agreement." Employees also...

In sweeping new proposals, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, announced her intention to limit employers in their ability to rely upon commonly used electronic monitoring and management technologies to monitor employee misconduct and performance issues. If adopted by the Board, the General Counsel’s proposals would have an enormous impact on employers in the exercise of their legitimate business interests to manage and monitor employee performance, during work hours, and impose appropriate discipline. Under the previous NLRB framework, employers were free to adopt technological changes that allowed them to more closely monitor employee work activity with...

Home Depot workers do not have the right to wear Black Lives Matter merchandise or imagery while on the job, a federal judge has ruled. In his ruling Friday, administrative judge Paul Bogas rejected a complaint from the US National Labor Relations Board that the home improvement retailer violated employees’ rights by barring them from displaying BLM gear

Workers allege the action is retaliatory, but the chain says closures are "a regular part of our operations." With thousands of locations nationwide, a single Starbucks closing typically isn't national news. But at a time when the coffee chain is dealing with a major unionization push from employees — and being accused of potentially illegal anti-union behavior in the process — the announcement that Starbucks is shuttering a unionized store in Ithaca, New York, is grabbing a lot of attention. Starbucks Workers United, the national group behind Starbucks employees' unionization efforts, said they would once again be filing an Unfair...

The upscale grocery chain Whole Foods claims the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) order to allow its employees to wear “Black Lives Matter” masks violates its constitutional rights. In October 2020, the Amazon-owned Whole Foods stoked controversy when it announced a new dress code policy that banned its employees from wearing “busy patterns on clothing or face coverings, buttons or pins on employee aprons, ripped jeans, athleisure, and t-shirts with visible logos, slogans, messages, or flags of any kind,” according to Insider. “When a lot of us started working at Whole Foods back in the day, it was a place...

In September 2021, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) underwent a leadership change with the appointment of Jennifer Abruzzo as General Counsel. Her appointment follows two new Democratic members, Gwynne Wilcox and David Prouty, being confirmed over the summer, resulting in a 3-2 Democratic majority. The General Counsel determines which cases are brought before the NLRB, and Abruzzo has been quick to make several sweeping changes that unfortunately will leave workers worse off. While Abruzzo is primarily concerned with micro-managing the contents of agreements between employees and employers, the proposed changes provide unwanted and unnecessary bureaucratic oversight that will burden...

Two of the nation's top labor arbiters will not recuse themselves from a case involving their former employer, a chief Democratic Party ally. David Prouty and Gwynne Wilcox serve on the five-member National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that dictates labor laws. Board chairman Lauren McFerran announced Friday that the pair will not recuse themselves from a lawsuit filed by the Service Employees International Union, their former employer. The SEIU is challenging a Trump-era "joint employment" rule, which holds that franchises are distinct from parent companies. Prouty directly opposed the Trump rule at the SEIU, as did Wilcox. Their...

The National Labor Review Board had released email exchanges between Google senior executive Urs Hölzle and former engineer Kevin Cernekee The correspondences show how Hölzle attempted to silence the employee from sharing his political beliefs and said his behaviors were 'entirely inappropriate' Cernekee reported the comments to the NLRB and filed a complaint arguing that the company was bashing white males NLRB regulators ruled that Google was 'justified' in firing Cernekee for alleged improper use of company equipment They also determined that Hölzle violated labor laws and infringed on Cernekee's first amendment rights

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — NAACP, state and local officials on Wednesday denounced what they called continued racism at an Amazon warehouse construction site in Connecticut where eight nooses have been found within a month, despite additional security measures added last weekend. The latest noose was found at the site in Windsor on Wednesday morning, the day of a scheduled meeting between workers and NAACP officials about safety and security, said Connecticut NAACP President Scot X. Esdaile. “We have a serious problem in America and it hasn’t gone away,” Esdaile said. “It's deplorable. It’s sickening. It’s a sick mindset that Black...

Conservatives are learning the hard way that joking about union organizing is no laughing matter. Commentator Ben Shapiro’s tongue-in-cheek tweet last year about striking employees spurred a federal complaint that touched off a seven-month investigation by the National Labor Relations Board, which ultimately dismissed the matter in a decision announced Monday. What was the tweet? Referring to Spotify staffers threatening to strike over comedian Joe Rogan’s show, Mr. Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, tweeted, “I have a message for DW employees. If you ever try anything like this, you can consider your strike permanent.” “NLRB’s dismissal of these frivolous...

In its filing submitted to the NLRB, the union listed 23 objections surrounding Amazon’s behavior during the monthslong campaign, including allegations of employee intimidation and manipulation. The RWDSU said Monday it has requested a hearing before the NLRB to discuss its objections.“The objections constitute conduct which prevented a free and uncoerced exercise of choice by the employees, undermining the board’s efforts to provide ‘a laboratory in which an experiment may be conducted, under conditions as nearly as ideal as possible, to determine the uninhibited desires of the employees,’” the RWDSU said Monday.Amazon spokeswoman Heather Knox told CNBC in a statement:...

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell on Monday announced that he's launching "MyStore," an online marketplace for entrepreneurs that will rival Amazon, the largest global internet-based store. Speaking on Steve Bannon's War Room: Pandemic, Lindell said, "I'm looking at another thing we're going to be launching, which is MyStore, which is a rival to Amazon." Currently, a version of MyStore is on the MyPillow website, featuring a range of patriotic and miscellaneous products, including "Freedom Flags," "Freedom Coffee," "USA Flag Pole," and conservative books about former President Donald Trump. Lindell boasted that his online store will include a range of products from...