The NLRB issued but another bizarre ruling last week that further establishes a union’s right to trash a company’s reputation just because it can. In the case of Southern New England Telephone Company dba AT&T Connecticut and Communication Workers of America the Board majority has ruled that wearing prison outfits on service calls because you want more money is protected activity. (We only wish we were making this up.) It seems the company failed to adequately make its case that employees doing service calls dressed as inmates with “prisoner of AT$T” emblazon on their backs will sully the company’s public image. Member Hayes in yet another pained dissent lamented, “Imagine that you are a customer of AT&T Connecticut awaiting a service call. The doorbell rings. You open it, and the first thing you see is someone wearing a T-shirt bearing only “INMATE #” on its front.” So go ahead and add prisoner costumes to the list of things a company, its customers and its non-union-drunk employees must now endure along with giant inflatable rats, roaches in the salad bar, Facebook slander, death threats, embarrassing street theater and billboards declaring you a U.N. human rights violator. Oh yes, and Danny Glover. On March 28 the Board sustained a union’s decertification election objection in Jurys Boston Hotel. The union, UNITEHERE, filed ULPs on provisions in the company’s handbook that prohibited employees from soliciting on hotel property, limited their “loitering” on premises and barred them from wearing “emblems, badges or buttons with messages of any kind.” The union knew of those clauses in the defunct handbook for years and made no previous objections to them. The handbook hadn’t been distributed in two years, the policies were not enforced during the election period and the company specifically told employees those policies no longer were in force, yet the Board still ruled there was evidence that the simple existence of those rules at one time “chilled” the election which was decided by a single vote. Employers are reminded to have all handbooks, even outdated ones, reviewed under the light of current Becker Board interpretations. Meanwhile, fittingly, Wilma Liebman, chair of the NLRB, was quoted this week comparing labor law to dinosaur DNA. At an appearance at the University of Minnesota Law School, Liebman gave a lecture on “Reviving American Labor Law” in which she admitted that through decades of application labor law has failed to keep up with changes in the workplace and “words like death and dying are commonly used” to describe it. She also admitted that a 1947 provision to the law “guarantees obsolescence” by constraining the board from considering the economic impact of its decisions. “The law is probably in decline,” she said, “but like dinosaur DNA, it is probably worth preserving.” Did these people not see Jurassic Park!? All this talk about obsolescence dovetails nicely into Liebman’s appearance this week before the House Appropriations Committee. While such funding appearances are routine, this one could be spiced up by last month’s failed Congressional attempt to fully defund the NLRB. The Workforce Subcommittee also recently demanded Liebman prove budget cuts to the NLRB truly undermine the Board’s sacred duty to singlehandedly save the labor movement from extinction.
