Leaving is too much labor

Posted by Olivia Grady on Wednesday, August 17th, 2016 at 3:41 pm - Permalink

U.S. News and World Report published this article by Diana Furchtgott-Roth on August 17, 2016:

This is National Employee Freedom Week, organized by the Nevada Policy Research Institute and the Association of American Educators to support workers' choice to leave their unions. 

The National Labor Relations Board has made it easier for workers to join unions. But if you want to leave, that's a different story.

It's easy to get into a union. The NLRB has reduced the time between a petition for union representation and a vote by workers from about 40 days to as few as 10 days. New union "quickie election" rules took effect in April 2015. 

Similarly, the NLRB has approved the use of "micro-unions," small groups of workers who want to belong to a union, even if the entire workforce does not choose to do so. In 2014 the board allowed unions to organize any small group of employees as long as they had "a community of interest." On August 9, for example, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the NLRB in approving a unit of Fed-Ex drivers in South Brunswick, New Jersey, as a bargaining unit, leaving out dockworkers and package loaders.

If the NLRB truly had workers' interests at heart, it would make it equally easy for workers to leave unions. But although it takes as few as 10 days to vote to join a union, it can take years to vote to leave.

To read the full article, please click here.