Back in 2011, the National Labor Relations Board tried to pass certain rules that would have changed the union-election process in eight ways:
- Allow for electronic filing of election petitions and other documents.
- Ensure that employees, employers and unions receive and exchange timely information they need to understand and participate in the representation case process.
- Standardize timeframes for parties to resolve or litigate issues before and after elections.
- Require parties to identify issues and describe evidence soon after an election petition is filed to facilitate resolution and eliminate unnecessary litigation.
- Defer litigation of most voter eligibility issues until after the election.
- Require employers to provide a final voter list in electronic form soon after the scheduling of an election, including voters’ telephone numbers and email addresses when available.
- Consolidate all election-related appeals to the Board into a single post-election appeals process and thereby eliminate delay in holding elections currently attributable to the possibility of pre-election appeals.
- Make Board review of post-election decisions discretionary rather than mandatory.
However, courts later determined that the Board didn’t have the authority to pass any election-rule changes, because it didn’t have enough Board members to have a quorum.
(Gawd, this post got real boring, real fast…)
Fast-forward a few years, the Board is fully-loaded. So, the Board is all like, why not try to get the rules passed again.
So, the Board will officially publish the rules today for public comment. Here is what SHRM said about the same rules back in 2011. And here is what others are saying about the resurfacing rules in 2014:
- WSJ Law Blog (Jacob Gershman): NLRB Seeks to Streamline Union-Organizing Elections
- WSJ (Melanie Trottman): Labor Board Moves To Expedite Union Votes
- The Employment Blawg (Mark Toth): NLRB (Again) Proposes Fast-Track Election Rules
- TheHill.com (Kevan Bogardus and Tim Devaney): NLRB resurrects union election rule
- Labor Relations Update (Ronald Meisburg): They’re Ba-ack: NLRB to Re-Propose Election Regulations
- Workplace Prof Blog: NLRB Proposed New/Old Election Rules
- Lawffice Space (Phil Miles): NLRB Proposes Amendments to Election Rules
The public will have until April 7, 2014 to submit comments.