Earlier this year, the NLRB’s GC, who is responsible for enforcing the NLRA, continued his annual practice of attending the Mid-Winter Meeting of the Practice and Procedure Committee of the ABA Labor and Employment Law Section. The GC answered questions the committee had collected from labor law practitioners around the country.
A few weeks ago, as has become the practice, the GC published a memorandum (pdf) summarizing the questions that were posed to him and the answers he provided. As in years past, the memorandum covers a wide range of topics that are too broad to cover effectively in this post.
Nonetheless, as I have done in prior years, I have listed some of the more noteworthy topics the memorandum covers below. The parenthetical references are to the page(s) in the memorandum on which the summarized discussion appears:
- 35.2% of all unfair labor practice charges with the regional offices of the NLRB are found meritorious. An overwhelming majority of those are then settled. Of those that are fully litigated, the NLRB wins in approximately 85% of the cases (2);
- The NLRB regularly includes in its settlement agreements language that produces adverse consequences for employers in the event of a default. The GC indicated that regional offices have discretion to limit that language in certain circumstances to the location where the violation occurred and to limit the duration of the language to a six-month period (6);
- The GC discusses in detail the new standards the NLRB has adopted for both pre-arbitration and post-arbitration deferral (8-10);
- GC provides an interesting update on Noel Canning. Of the hundreds of cases invalidated by the Supreme Court’s decision, only 30 have not been revisited by the NLRB and in all the cases that have been decided, the result only changed in one of them (14);
- In representation cases, the union’s win rate for elections held in fiscal year 2014 was 68% in union election cases and 33% in union decertification cases (26);
- Of particular significance given the recently effective quickie or “ambush” election rules, the GC reported that the medium number of days from filing a petition to having an election was 38 and that 95.7% of all elections were conducted within 56 days of the petition filing (26);
- The GC also provided some Q&A on the new election rules, covering a number of different issues (28).
Labor professionals with a particular interest in the foregoing and similar issues should review the GC’s memorandum in detail.