Reminder: Don’t Need a Union to Violate Labor Laws
A Texas blood bank just lost an NLRB case, and there’s not a union anywhere in the story. Employers keep forgetting that the National Labor Relations Act applies to non-union companies, too.
An employee at Carter BloodCare posted on Facebook urging coworkers to wear black scrubs on Sundays to protest Sunday assignments. Hashtags: hashtagSolidarity, hashtagTogetherWeCan. About 20 coworkers joined in.
Weeks later, management hauled him into a meeting, showed him the post, asked if he was trying to get staff to “rebel,” and pulled him from a Leadership Development Plan that was his path back to a promotion.
The judge found two violations. The questioning was an unlawful interrogation. And removing him from the program was unlawful retaliation for protected concerted activity.
Note: one employee rallying coworkers over working conditions is “concerted” activity under the Act. No union required. Section 7 protects it.
Then the unforced errors. They yanked him barely two months into a six-month plan. They’d given another employee with similar mistakes a full four months. And they didn’t call his direct supervisor — who’d rated him favorably — so the judge drew an adverse inference against them.
Per the judge, the managers were “labor law novices” who didn’t grasp what they were saying until it was too late.
To me, that’s the whole lesson. Your frontline managers don’t need a union drive to create liability. Are yours trained for it?