The AFL-CIO, which comprises about 50 labor unions and approximately 9-million members, has filed a protest with the International Labor Organization of the United Nations.
The AFL-CIO gripes that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should not have defined the role of supervisors in what is known as the Kentucky River cases, when the Board ruled that nurses who head shifts at health care facilities should be considered supervisors, and thus not be eligible to join unions.
Since NLRB rulings cannot be appealed in the U. S. Courts, the AFL-CIO has gone to an international body, hoping to embarrass the Board into changing its collective mind. The result, in fact, will be that the AFL-CIO will be embarrassed. Foreign bodies, such as the labor committee at the U.N. have no standing with US voters and legislators. Indeed, the United Nations is held in fairly low esteem by a broad cross section of Americans.
The labor movement has fallen to new levels of desperation, when it has to turn to an international body that exercises no control over some of the worst working conditions in third world countries.
A Domino Pizza delivery driver in Pensacola Florida has succeeded in organizing eleven of his co-workers, the first such successful organizing effort of pizza delivery drivers in the U.S. As president of the newly formed American Union of Pizza Delivery Drivers, Inc., Jim Pohle may have started a trend that will drive up the cost of calling for a pizza as well as drive up the costs of pizza dough. This aborning trend will not only affect pizza deliverers, but also all personnel who deliver for a vast array of fast food restaurants.
Pohle was helped in his efforts by a pro-union labor lawyer who had attempted to organize other pizza delivery drivers in the past but had not met with success. The new efforts paid off this time when the National Labor Relations Board accepted a petition submitted by Pohle and recognized his union.
His success and the recent efforts by others to organize workers at Starbucks mean that service workers throughout the U.S. will be likely candidates for a host of union organizers. For unions, service workers represent a large pool of potential new union members; as such, they also pose a challenge for owners of fast food franchises. If the owners of fast food restaurants don’t put in place programs to ward off unionization, they will find their workers being organized by highly aggressive organizers who have the backing of multi-million dollar national unions.
One would think that workers depend on their unions to negotiate wages and benefits. Unions also represent workers involved in disputes about terminations and other disciplinary procedures.
One would also think that nurses, as professional health care workers, would not only want to protect their own health, but also the health of their patients.
Not necessarily so!
Nurses at a medical center in Washington, who refused to get flu shots, objected to having to wear face masks!
Why would nurses not want to protect themselves against the flu? Why would those who did not get flu shots want to expose their patients to possible infection?
An administrative law judge has now sensibly ruled that the medical center did not have to bargain with the nurses union, before imposing a requirement that all nurses who refused to be inoculated against the flu must wear face masks.
Is it any wonder that union membership has been declining?
In this era, when more and more employees have supervisory responsibilities, it has come as welcome news that The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that some nurses who assign and direct others to perform tasks should be considered supervisors. As supervisors, those nurses are not entitled to join unions under federal law. The ruling has made a number of union officials furious, but Corporate America has breathed a sigh of relief, for now they can continue to expand the responsibilities of employees, making them more productive, without fear that they might join a union.
The NLRB Board, in a 3-2 decision, found that charge nurses regularly assigned nursing personnel to specific patients for whom they provided care. The board stated that such assignments meant that the nurses had, indeed, demonstrated “significant overall duties” to employees, and so obviously met the statutory definition of “assign” under the National Labor Relations Act.
Because the line between workers and supervisors has been blurring for many years, the NLRB decision is in keeping with a changing workplace. The ruling also goes a long way to erasing the us-versus-them adversarial relationship that has existed between workers and supervisors.
All good laws must take into account a changing reality, and the NLRB decision is particularly timely and relevant. It’s about time that a law that was passed nearly sixty years ago was finally updated!