Rep. Andrews Ensures That Workers’ Bargaining Rights Made Clear in Legislation Passed by House Labor Committee

By a vote of 26 to 20, the House Education and Labor Committee this week passed legislation to ensure the rights of millions of skilled, professional, and trade workers in the U.S. to join unions and bargain collectively.

In October 2006, the National Labor Relations Board handed down a trio of decisions – known collectively as the “Kentucky River” decisions – that could enable employers to reclassify many employees as “supervisors,” thereby denying them the right under the law to organize and bargain collectively. According to the Kentucky River rulings, skilled and professional workers who regularly direct a co-worker on a single, discrete task just 10 percent of the workday could be considered supervisors, even if they have no authority to discipline, reward, promote, hire, or fire employees.

Prior to the NLRB rulings, assuming the employer-sought rule prevailed, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that eight million workers would be immediately at risk of losing their collective bargaining rights because of the Kentucky River rulings. In the NLRB’s final decision, the dissent pointed out that the Kentucky River rulings could strip almost 34 million workers of their rights by 2012.

As a result of the Kentucky River decisions, in a recent case from Salt Lake City, a regional director of the NLRB ruled that 64 out of 88 registered nurses attempting to organize were supervisors. The remaining 24 nurses were considered non-supervisory employees only because they had less than one year’s service.

The legislation approved this week, the Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction and Tradesworkers Act (H.R. 1644), which I introduced would:

--Eliminate the terms “assign” and “responsibility to direct” from the list of supervisory duties currently outlined in the National Labor Relations Act. This would clarify, for example, that construction workers or nurses who often assign tasks to and direct the work of less-skilled and less-experienced workers, but who have no actual supervisory authority, are not supervisors.

--Require that employees possess supervisory authority during the majority of their work time in order to be excluded from coverage under the legislation as a supervisor.
The passage of the RESPECT Act will overturn the misguided decision of the NLRB in the Kentucky River trilogy and restore the law back to Congress’ original intent,” said Andrews. The affirmative vote on HR 1644 of all of my Democratic colleagues on the committee will protect the right to organize and collectively bargain for millions of American workers.

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