Often, people are shocked to discover that the employees of the purportedly neutral National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are themselves unionized and sometimes subject to disputes with management.
Here’s a case in point, via BloombergLaw:
National Labor Relations Board leaders faced a rare agency staff protest Nov. 8, the second such employee action in the current board’s first year.
Career staffers at the NLRB protested and handed out leaflets outside an American Bar Association conference attended by board Chairman John Ring. They say the agency is trying to make more cuts to pay and benefits despite ending the fiscal year with a budget surplus, and that it terminated two long-standing collective bargaining contracts for most of its staff to renegotiate the terms.
The protests are also aimed at Ring and General Counsel Peter Robb’s efforts to reverse the direction of federal labor policy and overhaul the agency, whose mission is to enforce workplace labor law and referee union elections. Senior career officials have said the moves and proposals made by President Donald Trump’s appointees would hobble the NLRB and gut American workers’ ability to file charges alleging unlawful workplace practices against employers.
Workers at federal agencies sign up with their employee unions at a much higher rate than workers in the private sector do. But the picketing and other protest actions often associated with private unions are rare in the federal government. There have been indications of internal strife under other agency heads in the Trump administration. The NLRB staffers’ public criticism of their leaders takes on added significance, however, given the agency’s own role as one of the government’s main enforcers of workplace and union rights.
“Since their appointment, General Counsel Robb and Chairman Ring have engaged in a systematic attack on the employees” and “the agency as a whole,” the staffers said in their leaflets. They pointed to the government’s annual employee surveys for 2018, noting that several measurements of employee confidence in leadership dropped steeply at the NLRB.
Read the rest here.
This is not the first time NLRB employees have protested the NLRB.
For example: here’s a couple of flashback to the pro-union Obama years:
— NLRB Staff Union Claims Pro-Union NLRB Bosses Have Declared War on NLRB Employees
— NLRB Commits Unfair Labor Practice With Its Own Union
