Thursday, July 19

NLRB: Less "Of the Earth", More "In the Wound"


The NLRB has changed its rules to disfavor “salting” campaigns. Shocker, we know.

But to do it without being asked, in the headwind of a still-young Supreme Court decision protecting salts under the NLRA is pretty ballsy, you have to admit.

Salts, of course, are the much-maligned folks that seek employment at non-union shops for the express purposes of unionizing the company’s workforce. They have the protection of the NLRA, according to the Supreme Court (well, the old one at least), but now the Board has changed the burden of proof in cases where companies refused or fired a salt. From now on (if that phrase is ever applicable to the NLRB), if a salt is going to get back pay for a company’s refusal to give him a job, his union will have to prove that he was planning to stay after he was done, ahem, “seasoning”.

The salting process is typically thought of like this: the union assigns a salt to a particular company. The salt then applies to the company, who either hires him or turns him down. If the salt gets hired, he attempts to unionize the company’s workforce and then moves on to another company as assigned by the union. If the employer refuses to hire a salt, or fires him when they find out why he’s really there, the salt files a refusal-to-hire or unlawful discharge claim with the NLRB, bringing the company’s non-union stance into the fore.

It is deception at its greatest, as far as most non-union companies are concerned. But to the unions, salting may represent their only real chance to gain access to a closed shop.

So, here’s the situation – When an employee is fired, or wrongfully refused a job, he or she is entitled to backpay for the period starting at the employer’s unlawful act (the firing) and going until the act is remedied, usually by an offer of reinstatement. The presumption was that, if hired or retained, the employee would have continued working at the shop for an indefinite period of time. The burden is squarely on the employer’s shoulders to prove why that isn’t the case.

In ’95, the Supreme Court held that salts are protected employees under the NLRA. That means that refusing to hire one of them, or firing one of them, should carry the same consequences as any other employee, right? Here’s where we pick up our most recent Board decision, already in progress:

The Board, in Oil Capitol Sheet Metal, Inc., 349 NLRB No. 118, decided that – for salts – the backpay presumption just doesn’t work. According to the Board, “rote application of the presumption has resulted in backpay awards that bear no rational relationship to the period of time a salt would have remained employed with a targeted nonunion employer.”

The majority (it’s a 3-2 decision) admits that there are times where a union could leave a salt in his position after the salting campaign, but claims that it should be the union’s job to prove it – not the employer’s to prove the salt would leave.

What’s the problem with all of this? Well, according to the dissent, the biggest problem is that nobody asked the Board to reconsider the issue. So, in the face of a Supreme Court decision, and without prompting from any of the parties, the Board has turned 180 degrees in its treatments of salting campaigns. It’s telling that, in referencing the Supreme Court’s holding that salts are people too (to paraphrase a little), the majority makes it clear that SCOTUS displayed “considerable deference accorded to the Board's interpretation of the Act”. I was trained in my labor law class to take this as a sign to the Circuits that they should reconsider the issue. Is the Board trying to fire a case up to the Supremes now that their ranks have shifted?

So, now here’s the question – is the change in policy justified? Given the nature of salting, isn’t it better to presume the employee is temporary? It is a pretty big burden on the employer to prove a negative, but they still have to do it in wrongful discharge cases of non-salt employees, so is that really a good justification for the change?

Oil Capitol - via Law Memo