The Obama administration is poised to change regulations to allow for union “ambush elections” in which workers have less time to decide whether or not to join a union — and in which workers’ phone numbers and home addresses are provided to unions.
The administration’s National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) proposed rules would allow for union elections — in which workers at a company vote whether or not to unionize — to be held 10 days after a petition is filed. And what, exactly, would be happening to the unions during those 10 days? The new rules require employers to disclose workers’ personal information, including phone numbers, home addresses, and information about when they work their shifts.
Insiders close to the situation believe the new rules will almost certainly go into effect with few or no fundamental changes.
“The members of the Board went through two days of grueling hearings that went into the evening. They asked plenty of probing questions. But I wonder if any minds were changed at all,” Workforce Fairness Institute spokesman Fred Wszolek, who recently testified at an NLRB hearing in opposition to the rule, told The Daily Caller.
“Certainly some parts of the proposed rule will be changed at the margin. But it seems very likely that going forward, union organizing elections will happen much more quickly and more private contact information of employees will be turned over to the unions,” Wszolek said.
“If Board members wanted to truly modernize these rules, they would do two things. First, leave the timetable alone. Thirty or forty days to hold an election is not a long time. Let people think about it. Second, if you’re going to give access to unions any personal email addresses a company has, fine. But let’s protect the privacy of workers by no longer requiring companies to give to the union the home addresses of workers. It’s very hard to intimidate or coerce a worker by email. But it’s much easier to intimidate or coerce a worker when you’re standing on their doorstep,” Wszolek said.
As TheDC previously reported, United Auto Workers (UAW) members in black shirts recently paced the assembly line intimidating workers during normal business hours before the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted not to unionize. The NLRB is holding a hearing Monday to determine whether or not to discard the plant’s election results, on the grounds that they were tainted by outside sources, and allow the plant to be unionized.
