The Employer Handbook turns 2; and the NLRB keeps hatin’ on employers

Whatcha get the blog for its birthday? Was it an iTunes subscription to Season One of Amish Mafia?

Don’t judge the blog. The blog doesn’t like to be judged.

After the jump, the selfless blog got you a recap of seven recent National Labor Relations Board decisions affecting your workplace…

 

In anticipation of losing one of its members, the Board was very busy late last year  issuing decisions affecting and twisting the knife into union and non-union employers. A recent board press release summarized six of them.

Of particular note are this decision in which the Board found that five non-union employees were unlawfully discharged because of their Facebook activity and this decision in which the Board ruled that, in most cases in which backpay is awarded, an employer will have to compensate employees for any extra taxes they have to pay as a result of receiving the backpay in a lump sum.

Then came this case, in which the Board overruled past precedent and held that, as part of pre-arbitration discovery, a union may now discover witness statements obtained during an employer investigation of workplace misconduct. Why is this important? Because, as the dissent pointed out, “Employers now will potentially violate EEOC guidelines if required to furnish a union with witness statements in connection to an employer’s investigation of an employee’s harassment complaint.”

I hope, for the sake of both employers and their employees, the EEOC and NLRB can coordinate future guidance so as to remove the friction created by these divergent confidentiality protocols.

But neither I, nor the blog, are holding our breath.