The NLRB Says Calling Grievances “Bullshit” Isn’t a Threat

A divided Board just gave employers breathing room at the bargaining table — and then showed exactly where it ends.

The case is Inland Waters Pollution Control, Inc., Case 07-CA-277239, decided July 29, 2026. Inland is a Michigan pollution control company.

During contract negotiations, the company made statements about an employee filing “bullshit” grievances. In June 2022, Administrative Law Judge Andrew S. Gollin found that was an unlawful threat.

Four years later, the Board’s Republican members reversed him. The General Counsel’s lawyers didn’t carry their burden of proving a threat under the Act. Board precedent, the majority wrote, allows for a “frank, and not always complimentary exchange of views” during contract negotiations.

The majority also reversed Gollin on the company’s bargaining proposal, which would have reserved Inland’s right to discipline employees for filing “baseless, malicious or harassing” grievances. The footnote is important: neither the judge nor any party “cited a case in which the Board has found that the act of making a bargaining proposal at the bargaining table constitutes an unlawful threat.”

Member David Prouty, the panel’s only Democrat, dissented on the threat findings. Latitude for hard bargaining and intemperate statements is real, he wrote, but the fact that a statement is “framed as a bargaining proposal does not immunize the speaker.” He would have found that an employee would reasonably read those statements as an effort to restrain grievance filing.

Now for where the employer’s breathing room ends.

The full Board — unanimously — upheld the finding that Inland unlawfully fired two employees for union and other protected activity. The amended remedy orders reinstatement and back pay.

So the words at the table were lawful. The terminations were not.

For employers in negotiations: the Act gives you room to talk like a negotiator, including bluntly, and to put an aggressive proposal on the table. It gives you no room at all to act on that sentiment when you get back to the shop floor. Those are two different questions, and this Board answered them differently on the same set of facts.

For more like this, please subscribe to my newsletter The Labor Leader: https://lnkd.in/gMzA2V-n

For a weekly recap of all NLRB publications, please subscribe to my newsletter NLRB Publications Weekly: https://lnkd.in/gJ2gaM9P