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Legislation to enable workers to regain their rightful place as partners in the workplace with employers moved a step closer to becoming law today. The U.S. House Education and Labor Committee approved the Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradeworkers (RESPECT) Act on a 26–20 vote and sent the bill to the full House, where it will be considered later this year.
The RESPECT Act, H.R. 1644, was introduced by Reps. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) and Don Young (R-Ala.). It would reverse a Republican party-line vote by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in September 2006 that slashed longtime federal labor law protections of workers’ freedom to form unions.
The NLRB rulings came in three cases, collectively known as the Oakwood cases after the lead case, Oakwood Healthcare Inc., which reinterpreted the definition of “supervisor” in a way that greatly expanded the number and types of workers who can be classified as supervisors.
Although two of the three cases involved only nurses, the expanded definition applies to workers in every industry and means up to 8 million workers, including nurses, building trades workers and others, may be classified as supervisors and kept from joining unions. Under federal labor law, supervisors are not protected against retaliation for forming unions.
The NLRB’s new definition of supervisor—which the bill would reverse—essentially enables employers to make a supervisor out of any worker who has the authority to assign or direct another and uses independent judgment.
Amazingly, the board also ruled a worker can be classified as a supervisor if he or she spends as little as 10 percent to 15 percent of his or her time overseeing the work of others. That breaks down to less than an hour a day or one full shift every two weeks.
In a letter to House members in July, AFL-CIO Legislation Director William Samuel pointed out the RESPECT Act is urgently needed to protect the collective bargaining rights of workers in a wide range of occupations.
The RESPECT Act would restore the original intent of Congress that employees with only minor supervisory duties should be considered supervisors under the National Labor Relations Act.
As the bill works its way through Congress, workers are tackling the issue at the bargaining table. In one of the largest-ever organizing agreements for registered nurses, the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) signed a national pact with Tenet Healthcare Corp. that includes an important protection for nurses’ rights. Tenet agreed that it will not seek to exclude nurses from union representation on the dubious claim that they are “supervisors” under the new NLRB rules.
The pact, which could open the door for up to 3,000 registered nurses at Tenet facilities around the country to join a union, comes as the CNA/NNOC celebrates its tremendous growth. The Oakland-based union has gone from some 17,000 members in California a decade ago to about 75,000 members from coast to coast.
During House hearings on the RESPECT Act last May, more than 50 nurses from several AFL-CIO unions packed the hearing room to hear witnesses, including one of their colleagues, set a congressional panel straight about the Oakwood decisions.
Testifying before the House Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions Subcommittee, Lori Gray, a registered nurse at the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center in Salt Lake City, said she and 150 of her co-workers voted to join the United American Nurses. But their vote and dozens of others never have been counted because the hospital claimed two-thirds of the nurses were supervisors and ineligible to join a union. Gray testified at the hearing:
For five years, our ballots have remained impounded while we have waited for clarification on what it means to be a supervisor. The ballot I cast in 2002 has never been opened and may never be counted.
When the Oakwood decisions were released last year, the Washington, D.C., NLRB remanded our case back to the regional director. According to the regional director’s decision, 64 out of 153 nurses at the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center in 2002 were supervisors, including myself.
(Click here to see an archived webcast of the hearing and access witness testimony.)
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