The National Labor Relations Board, the main federal labor law enforcement agency, ruled Friday that businesses can ban nonemployee union activists from their property.
The ruling is a win for businesses since it limits the kinds of protests unions can use against employers. The case is significant because union protests of companies often involve labor officials who are not employees and other outside activists sympathetic to the union’s goals.
The board ruled 4-0, in the case Kroger v. United Food and Commercial Workers Union 400, that the company was within its rights to bar protest activity by a union representative from its parking lot even though the protester was an official with the union that represented its workers. Only a union member who was also an employee had the right to be on the property, the board ruled. The fact that the company had allowed nonemployees onto its property for other reasons, such as promoting charities, was deemed irrelevant by the board.
“[A]n employer may deny access to non-employees seeking to engage in protest activities on its property while allowing nonemployee access for a wide range of charitable, civic, and commercial activities that are not similar in nature to protest activities,” the board ruled.
The case involved union protests over plans to close the store and two nearby ones and the lack of opportunities the company gave to workers to transfer to other local Kroger stores. The protests involved union officials calling on customers to get the company to relocate the workers. An NLRB administrative law judge had said in 2016 that the company’s policy of barring the protests “clearly targeted unions and other groups that wanted or tried to protest, demonstrate, picket, [or] handbill” on the premises, and constituted discrimination against the union.
