Asking Employee If He Saw Union Organizer Lawful Interrogation

How the NLRB treats employer statements made to employees in the context of unionizing often depends on the make-up of the Board at the time the case is reviewed. The Bush Board was more relaxed than the Obama Board that treated an employer’s statement as coercive if it was made in the context of union…
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BuzzFeed Journalists Unionize

After layoffs in January, remaining BuzzFeed U.S. journalists agreed to unionize. The workers joined NewsGuild, which is part of the Communication Workers of America. The January layoffs eliminated 15% of BuzzFeed’s headcount and gutted several parts of the newsroom. The cutbacks at BuzzFeed were not unique. They were part of a wave of layoffs at…
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Michigan Bell Mustn’t Name Union Snitch

Michigan Bell Telephone Company lawfully denied a union’s request to tell the union the name the worker who tipped off the company about a possible workplace protest and provide the union with a list of people who the informant contacted. But, the telephone company should have provided the union with a summary of what the…
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Most of Video Game Industry Open to Unionization

A recent industry survey suggests that crunch time (100-hour weeks leading up to game releases) and similar issues are why nearly half the employees in the game development industry are looking to become represented by a union. The Game Developers Conference (“GDC”) surveyed almost 4,000 game industry professionals. Several survey questions addressed the time and…
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NLRB to Scrutinize Whether Charter Schools Can Unionize

The National Labor Relations Board agreed to potentially modify or overrule a pair of Obama-era rulings that asserted jurisdiction over charter schools. The National Labor Relations Act gives the NLRB authority over private businesses. The Board must decide if charter schools are public or private entities. In 2016, the Obama-NLRB handed down a pair of…
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Ohio’s New Joint Employer Law Avoids Browning-Ferris Application to Some State Claims

The issue started with the NLRB’s 2015 decision in Browning-Ferris Industries of California, Inc., 362 NLRB No. 186, which overturned 30 years of precedent and established that employers could be held responsible as joint employers by doing as little as reserving control, or exerting indirect control, over workers of another company. This overturned three decades…
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