An employee brought lithium-ion batteries from home for a personal e-cigarette. They sparked a fire at work and injured him. Recordable? OSHA says yes, and a recent Letter of Interpretation explains why every employer should pay attention. Under OSHA’s recordkeeping rules, an injury is “work-related” if an event in the work environment caused, contributed to,…

A court-appointed monitor says UAW President Shawn Fain retaliated against his own vice president, and did it to help a family member. The timing couldn’t be worse for Fain. Ballots for the UAW’s leadership election go out in late August, and his challenger is the very deputy at the center of the report. Monitor Neil…

Employers keep reading a more Republican Board as a green light to keep an eye on the drive. That’s backwards. Here’s the trap. When the NLRB banned captive audience meetings in Amazon.com Services LLC (Nov. 2024), one of its reasons was that those meetings let employers “observe and surveil” employees. The captive audience story is…

An NLRB regional director just cleared the way for 23 radiation therapists at Stanford Health Care to vote on joining an existing SEIU unit. This is an Armour-Globe “self-determination” election, where a small group votes on whether to be absorbed into a larger bargaining unit. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West petitioned to add the therapists to…

You can watch, but be careful. That is the whole lesson of the NLRB’s Amazon decision, and it is the part almost everyone is missing right now. Employers see a more Republican, more employer-friendly Board in Washington and read it as a green light to keep a close eye on the organizers in their plant.…

A federal appeals court just vacated class certification in a wage-and-hour case against Anheuser-Busch. Predominance and commonality did the work. Class certification lives or dies on Rule 23. To certify, plaintiffs must show that common questions predominate over individual ones, and that the claims share genuine commonality. The court found the certification order came up…