The House voted 233-181 Thursday morning to prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from implementing a new rule that would speed up the scheduling of union workplace organizing elections, often called the “quickie election rule”.
Republicans call it the “ambush election rule” and said it would mostly benefit union leaders, and they invoked the rarely-used Congressional Review Act in an effort to overturn it.
The Senate approved the resolution overturning NLRB rule on March 4 in a mostly party-line 53-45 vote.
The board’s rule is likely to stand, however, since the White House has said it would veto the resolution, and the Senate vote indicates that Republicans do not have the votes to override it, making Thursday’s vote largely symbolic.
“The Obama administration is trying to fix a problem that does not exist,” said Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn. “The NLRB is trying to stack the game in favor of union bosses.”
The board is a quasi-independent federal agency that enforces the National Labor Relations Act. Its five-member board currently has a 3-2 Democratic majority. In December, it adopted a new rule, long sought by organized labor, that requires union workplace elections to be scheduled about two weeks after the board authorized them. Previously, the process typically took one to two months and sometimes longer.
Labor leaders hate any delay because businesses often used the interim weeks to press their employees to vote against the union. Republicans argue this is fair because workers deserve to hear both sides before they make up their mind.
Another problem with the rule, Roe said, was that it required employers to give union leaders the personal contact information for all their employees, regardless of whether the employees authorized this. “The rule would open up employees to harassment and intimidation,” he said.
Democrats countered that the existing rules gave business leaders too much power to undermine union drives and that speeding up the scheduling of elections would remedy this. “Employers should not be able to endlessly delay elections,” said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo. “The critics of the NLRB don’t want a level playing field.”
The NLRB has long sought to make the change. It first adopted the rule in 2012, only to have in struck down in court because the board had lacked a proper quorum at the time. The NLRB had a full five Senate-approved members when it approved the 2014 version, so the validity of the board is not an issue.
According to the NLRB’s data, workplace elections have occurred on average about 38 days after the filing of a petition over the last decade. Unions win most of the time.
Of the 1,330 workplace elections held in fiscal year 2013, organized labor won 852.
