Labor Board Blurs Line Between Management Rights And Protected Activity And Then Orders A "Perp" Walk

Labor Board Stretches to Blur Line Between Management Rights and Protected Activity and Then Orders a "Perp Walk"

In a case decided on August 11, the National Labor Relations Board affirmed an Administrative Law Judge's determination that an employer, the publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press, committed numerous violations of the National Labor Relations Act. That was not remarkable. Coercive interrogations about union activity, surveillance of union activities, requiring the removal of union buttons and signs and terminating a supervisor for refusing to commit unfair labor practices clearly violate the Act and have done so for over half a century.

What was remarkable is that the Board decided an issue that was not required for the holding and, instead, appears to have gone out of its way unnecessarily to broadly define activity protected by the Act.