the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Can’t win the game? Just change the rules

“Today’s 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.”
- from dissenting opinion in the “Kentucky River” decisions

I’ve been meaning to say I’m less than thrilled by this news. It’s as if someone went overboard when they realized they couldn’t convince workers unions were bad. Running out of convincing arguments, they had to just remove the option entirely.

Lest the naive among us misunderstand the context, this is about much more than being able to join a union. Do not be fooled into believing that the National Labor Relations Act only benefits union members. It also gives a whole slew of rights to non-union workers, most of which will go right out the window for people whose job titles can now be twisted into “supervisor.”

I’m curious; have there been any major rulings in recent years that haven’t curtailed workers’ collective bargaining rights? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

But I guess we do have to protect our frail corporations from those big bad workers.

I remember reading about this, probably before it was a “done deal”

This wouldn’t be the same mentality that is looking to redefine torture as “everything THEY do and nothing WE do” is it???

It just became a done deal. As I hinted above, though, it was widely trumpeted as simply a battle over who has the right to join a union (which I believe to be an important one), but it goes deeper than that.

There are rights all workers used to have under the NLRA, whether or not they were unionized, like the rights of employees to assemble for common goals, or seek support from fellow workers (as witnesses, etc.) in disciplinary processes. And those are just two basic examples.

This decision didn’t just limit the rights of certain workers to join a union, it essentially rules that they aren’t even covered by the basic provisions of the nation’s most fundamental labor law. Not surprisingly, I’ve talked to a lot of people who don’t much care for unions who aren’t quite getting the ramifications of this case, but some of them will come to find some pretty basic protections they’ve been taking for granted are no longer there.