A South Carolina company had a tiered management system. At the bottom, employee groups were guided by team leads who reported to supervisors who oversaw between 20 and 40 employees. The supervisors reported to managers who in turn reported to the company’s vice president of operations. The issue was whether the supervisors could vote in…

I have had several clients over the past year assume that since they did not sign previous iterations of their collective bargaining agreements that they were not bound to those agreements. If only it was that simple. While I’ve been telling those companies that they must still comply with the contracts, I now have some…

An employee was upset that the retail store she worked at stayed opened as late as it did because the store was located in an unsafe neighborhood. After the store owner did not change the hours of operation, the disgruntled employee posted on Facebook remarks about her “immature” manager and that she would bring a…

Of the approximately 2,000 employees at Cargill Meat Solutions, Inc.’s Fort Morgan plant, 600 are Somali. Nearly 200 Somalis walked off the job in protest that they were deprived of on-the-job prayer time. This is a Teamster facility, and the Somalis were terminated for violating the no-strike clause of their collective bargaining agreement. The Union…

Fellow Ohio attorney Jon Hyman, author of “Ohio Employer’s Law Blog” recently dove deep into the footnotes of the Whole Foods decision and resurfaced with an excellent, albeit frightening, analysis of the Board’s thought process. Footnotes 7 and 9 may provide a peek into the Board’s future desire to, as Jon says, “stretch the definition…

A few weeks ago, the NLRB ruled that non-union Whole Foods’ workplace policy that prohibits employees from recording conversations or taking pictures with their phones was unlawful. The Board thought this policy stifled open conversation. Ironically, Whole Foods said the policy was, in fact, to encourage open conversation because people may be less frank if…