Posted: March 21, 2008
Editor’s note: This post by James Parks appeared March 19 on the AFL-CIO weblog.
A key international agency ruled March 19 that the Bush
administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is denying workers’
rights in violation of international labor standards.
The International Labor
Organization’s ILO’s Committee on Freedom of Association held that the NLRB’s
definitions of “supervisor” in the Oakwood cases violates freedom
of association standards by excluding staff that only occasionally perform
supervisory duties from protection of the National Labor Relations Act. The
United States is bound to follow international core labor standards as a member
of the ILO.
Because the Republican majority on the NLRB has
systematically and egregiously reduced the freedom of workers to join unions,
the AFL-CIO took the unusual step of filing a complaint with the ILO, an
arm of the United Nations, last October.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney
welcomed the decision.
“The Bush-dominated NLRB has
taken every opportunity to arm U.S. employers with the tools to defeat the
attempt of workers to gain a voice at work. The ILO’s decision in this case
vindicates workers’ rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining,
despite the attempts at spinning it by U.S. employers. We will continue to
expose the shameful conduct of the U.S. government in every forum available to
us as we seek to strengthen the ability of workers to form and join unions,”
Sweeney said.
In three cases collectively known as
the Oakwood cases after the lead case, Oakwood
Healthcare Inc., the board in 2006 reinterpreted the definition of
“supervisor” in a way that greatly expanded the number and type of workers who
can be classified as supervisors. The expanded definition applies to workers in
every industry and means up to 8 million workers, including nurses, building
trades workers, newspaper and television employees and others, may be
classified as supervisors and barred from joining unions.
The case originated when some 220 registered nurses at
Heritage, an acute-care hospital in Taylor, Mich., voted in a UAW election in
February 2002. The NLRB impounded the votes because the hospital, owned by
Oakwood, claimed the RNs are supervisors.
The ILO in previous years has ruled that other U.S.
government decisions violated workers’ rights, including the 2002 Supreme
Court’s Hoffman Plastics ruling,
which took the unprecedented step of denying an undocumented immigrant worker
lost wages after he was illegally fired for exercising his rights under the
National Labor Relations Act to form a union.
In another case, the ILO last year held that airport
screeners could not be denied the right to form and join unions and engage in
collective bargaining, in the name of “national security.”