Employees and plaintiff lawyers are savvy these days. They know that the best way to get a fast settlement is to cripple a company by filing several workplace charges in a variety of places like the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division, the National…

Employees at an industrial aluminum facility in New York started a union organizing drive. The Company countered with an anti-union campaign. The union lost the election by roughly 271 votes for representation to 285 votes to stay union-free. During the campaign period, the union filed numerous unfair labor practice charges alleging that the Company restored…

National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Richard Griffin instructed NLRB Regional Offices to request employees be reimbursed for job search costs and work-related expenses they incur due to violations of the National Labor Relations Act. This order modified a 2011 order by then acting-general counsel Lafe Solomon. Solomon wrote that the Board’s practice was to…

The United Food and Commercial Workers union tried to organize workers at a Hillshire Brands Co. facility in Texas. As part of its campaign, non-employees handed out pamphlets at the end of the company’s driveway. The organizers stood on a 10-foot wide corridor designated by the city as a public right of way. The Company’s…

Phillips 66 maintained a policy that prohibited comments about “company operations” that could “reasonably be understood by employees to prevent them from commenting on their own wages or employment conditions or any labor dispute with their employer.” The Company argued, on the other hand, that the policy was intended to control disclosures about confidential operations.…

The National Labor Relations Board ordered reinstatement of a nurse who was fired for making vulgar sexual comments and jokes. Specifically, the Respondent hospital showed that it terminated the nurse after she “engaged in grossly offensive, profane, and intimidating workplace behavior that provoked an unprecedented number of her co-workers to complain of a hostile work…