The illegally unauthorized appointed NLRB.
Republican lawmakers said they would make reining in the National Labor Relations Board a priority next year, after the board announced a series of rulings and announcements that were cheered by union leaders and slammed by business.
“At nearly every turn, this National Labor Relations Board has operated as a union advocate — instead of as the umpire it was intended to be. In the new Congress, I will work to roll back this partisan overreach and restore fairness to the board,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
Alexander will be the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee once the GOP majority takes over in January. He has previously promised to purse legislation to rein in the NLRB by moving it to a six-member board, evenly split between Republican and Democratic appointees. Such a change would mean the board would be likely to deadlock along partisan lines in controversial cases.[…]
The NLRB said businesses now have seven days after the board authorizes a workplace election to raise any concerns. It strictly limited the objections employers could raise and said the board’s regional administrators could defer questions about which workers should be allowed to vote until after the election.
The rule, which unions had long wanted, would allow most union elections to be held about two weeks after they are sanctioned, a process that currently can take months. Businesses typically used the interim period to make the case to their workers that unionizing wasn’t in their best interests. Under the new rule, businesses will have little time to do this.
The NLRB also required companies to turn over employee contact information to unions, including personal cell phone numbers and email addresses, regardless of whether the workers authorized the disclosure.