Seven Years Later

I started this blog in 2011 and wrote fairly regularly for a couple of years. I discontinued it in 2014.

Seven years later, I thought I would dust the cobwebs off and try my hand at blog posting again. 

Required Reading for Catholics in Labor and Employment Law: Ken Matheny's "THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LABOR UNIONS AND THE SOCIAL ENCYCLICALS OF POPES JOHN PAUL II AND BENEDICT XVI"

Pope John Paul II

Ken Matheny has an article out in the Winter 2014 issue of the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, The Disappearance of Labor Unions and the Social Encyclicals of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  It is worth a read for anyone interested in labor and employment issues and a must read for Catholics.  The article, like many, considers changes to the economic landscape and the diminished relevance of labor unions in America today while offering thoughts on the future of workers' associations.  Unlike other articles that contemplate these issues,  Matheny's article is powerfully informed by centuries of Catholic social doctrine and informs the reader along the way.

Inherently Concerted: Sabo, Inc. d/b/a Hoodview Vending 359 NLRB No. 36 (2012)

Can a simple discussion between employees be protected concerted activity under Section 7 of the NLRA?

Yes.

If employees are discussing a "vital term and condition" of employment, they are protected when they talk to one another about it.  These conversations are "inherently concerted."  It does not matter if the speaker or the listener agreed, or whether the speaker was trying to change things or persuade the listener. This is a bright line rule.  With one exception...

What are "vital terms and conditions of employment"?

According to the NLRB, they are the terms/conditions that you might generally expect employees to seek unionization about or engage in other group action about.  These are the basic ingredients, the flour, eggs, and sugar if you will, of organization and collective action.  So far, the Board has identified wages, work schedules/hours, and job security as "vital terms and conditions".

Are there others?

 I don't think that the list could be too large, but some other basics might make it.  For instance, safety would be a good candidate in my book.

The Board lays out the history of this doctrine and its justification in Hoodview Vending, 359 NLRB No. 36 (2012).  It is well worth the read, but in case you would rather watch, I have put together two animated scenes (30 seconds each) that depict the essence of the relevant facts.  The first one shows the essence of the activity at issue and the second scene captures essentially what the Board believed happened.

The Board held that because job security is a vital term, the conversation was inherently concerted and therefore the discharge was unlawful.

Jujitsu in EEOC v. Kaplan

I have always loved the passage from The Art of War about the general who is facing an enemy army on the other side of a river.  The two armies are at a stand off.  The general is informed that his forces are running perilously low on arrows (and won't be able to ward off an attack). What does the general do? He orders empty boats swung out at the enemy in a feigned attack.  The enemy volleys a multitude of arrows at the boats.  The boats are hauled back in and the general has his men collect the wasted arrows.

http://www.caiguoqiang.com/projects/borrowing-your-enemys-arrows-1

What a tactic; you start from a position of weakness, then use cunning to drain your enemy of his resources while simultaneously restoring yourself to a position of strength.

This isn't an exact parallel to the general on the river, but something about what happened in  EEOC v. Kaplan Higher Learning Edu. Corp. (N.D. Ohio 1/28/13) reminds me of it.  In that case, which issued earlier this week, Kaplan's attorneys turned the EEOC's policies back around at themselves (twice) and as a result won a motion for summary judgment.  How can you not admire that kind of lawyering?

As you may recall, as part of its statistical discrimination initiative, in 2010, the EEOC filed a suit against Kaplan University for its practice of using applicants' credit histories as a factor in hiring decisions.  Kaplan was not docking applicants for late payments or grading them on debt/asset ratios, but was only looking at large defaults and other red flags.  The EEOC alleged that Kaplan's practice was discriminating against minorities based on the disparate impact of these practices.

Kaplan's first legal Jujitsu maneuver was during discovery where it requested documents establishing the EEOC's own practice of using credit history to assess job candidates.  The EEOC at first committed to turning the records over, then balked, then was ordered to turn them over by a not so happy federal judge (Judge Patricia Gaughan).  As it turns out, the EEOC itself looks at applicant credit reports in 84 of its 97 positions because “overdue just debts increase temptation to commit illegal or unethical acts as a means of gaining funds to meet financial obligations”.  Although the case did not turn on this discovery request, there is a certain irony in that the rationale that the EEOC uses to defend its regular practice of checking applicants' credit history applies just as equally to every employer the EEOC regulates, and that irony does not appear to have been lost on Judge Gaughan.

Kaplan's second and critical act of Jujitsu came when it challenged the EEOC's prima facie case.  The EEOC's prima facie case was based on evidence that the applicants that Kaplan rejected on the basis of credit reports were disproportionately minorities.  To establish this prima facie case, the EEOC needed one critical piece of data: the race/ethnicity of the applicants.  Getting this information was an obstacle for the EEOC because Kaplan did not record the race of its applicants (the EEOC attempted to no avail to argue that the EEOC's model guidelines for employers call for gathering and retaining such information).

In order to find out the respective races of the applicants, the EEOC used their names and presumably their social security numbers to look up information about them from their local departments of motor vehicles.  However, only 14 of the 38 states from which the applicants hailed had records of race associated with drivers licenses.  For those states that did not have racial self-identification on the drivers license, the EEOC ordered the drivers license photographs of the applicants...With the pictures in hand, the EEOC had a panel of five "expert" "race raters" look at the pictures and determine the race of the applicants...You might be wondering, "What kind of credential does an expert race rater have?" The judge also wondered and was not at all impressed with their varied credentials of the raters who held advanced degrees in either economics, human development, psychology, or cultural anthropology, and had no established background in visually identifying an individual's race.  Further discrediting the "race rater" panel was its inability for 80% of its raters to reach a consensus as to the race of 11.7% of the applicants.

The lack of expertise and inability to reliably judge race was bad enough for the EEOC, but Kaplan's second Jujitsu move came in when they showed that the EEOC's own guidelines (the ones they tried to employ against Kaplan) deem visual identification as an undesirable way of identifying race and ethnicity. Thus Judge Gaughan noted that the "EEOC itself frowns on the very practice it seeks to rely on in this case" and ultimately dismissed the complaint on summary judgement for lack of a prima facie case.

Kaplan's attorneys did not exactly mimic the general on the river, but like him, they started from a position of weakness and used cunning to turn their adversary's resources against it.

NLRB Reiterates Rules on Investigation Confidentiality

A recent NLRB decision caused some ripples around the web, and I am a little bit surprised by the commotion.  The decision appears to have been a fairly straight forward reiteration of precedent that is at least a decade old.

The decision is Banner Estrella Medical Center, 358 NLRB No. 93 (2012). The cause of the controversy is the Board's ruling that the employer violated the NLRA through a policy that prohibited employee discussions about matters the employer was investigating.  After an employee made a complaint to the employer--pursuant to the employer's blanket policy--he was then forbidden from discussing the subject of the complaint with other employees.  Citing a similar decision it made last year in Hyundai America Shipping Agency, 357 NLRB No. 80, slip op. at 15 (2011), the Board stated

To justify a prohibition on employee discussion of ongoing investigations, an employer must show that it has a legitimate business justification that outweighs employees’ Section 7 rights.

This seems very similar to the Board's reasoning in Caesar’s Palace, 336 NLRB 271, 272 (2001)

The issue is whether the interests of the Respondent’s employees in discussing this aspect of their terms and conditions of employment outweighs the Respondent’s asserted legitimate and substantial business justifications.

In Caesar's Palace, the employer required silence among employees about an ongoing drug-investigation.  The Board held that the employer's interest in a safe investigation outweighed the employees' interest in discussing a workplace condition. 

In Phoenix Transit Systems, 337 NLRB 510 (2002), the Board found that the employer violated the NLRA by maintaining a confidentiality rule which prohibited employees from discussing their sexual harassment complaints among themselves.

In Hyundai America Shipping Agency, 357 NLRB No. 80, slip op. at 15 (2011) where managers "routinely instruct[ed] employees involved in investigations not to talk with other employees about the substance of those investigations", the employer's policy was considered unlawful.




Nothing then is surprising about the Board's conclusion in Banner Estrella where the employer had a blanket policy of instructing employees to refrain from discussing the subject matter of complaints while they were being investigated.


And the underlying principle hardly seems controversial. These are the main points as I see them:
1. Under Section 7 employees have the right to discuss terms and conditions of employment.
2. The terms and conditions of employment that employees have the right to discuss include issues such as whether a manager is sexually harassing an employee(s) and whether certain employees are being treated differently than other employees.
3. Employers will at times seek to investigate controversies surrounding the terms and conditions of employment.
4. If employers tell employees that they may not discuss the controversies while they are being investigated, they have necessarily infringed on the employees' Section 7 rights.
5. Any infringement on Section 7 rights must be justified.
6. Some workplace controversies require a high need of confidentiality to protect the employers' interests and the witnesses' interest. For instance an employer investigating a drug ring in its facility has an interest in protecting its witnesses from criminal retribution.
7. Some workplace controversies do not require a high degree of confidentiality to protect an employer's or witnesses' interest.  For example an employer investigating a matter that is mostly documented through email or caught on surveillance footage may not fear the effects of collusion as much as in purely "he said, she said" investigations.
8. Requiring employees to refrain from speaking to other employees about the subject of an investigation may work against the employees' interests because it may stop them from obtaining helpful information or generating a concerted protest.
9. Some balancing of the competing interests must be taken into consideration before stopping employees from discussing workplace conditions.