A divided National Labor Relations Board abandoned its Biden-era precedent for assessing offensive employee conduct, concluding it was invalidated two years ago by a federal appeals court.
The NLRB’s Republican majority said Wednesday it wasn’t overruling its Lion Elastomers LLC decision. Instead, it acknowledged the legal effect of a US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit holding that the board couldn’t use that case to overturn its General Motors LLC standard set during the first Trump administration.
“We are merely recognizing the court’s holding now that the case is back before us,” the GOP members said.
The decision hands employers a major win by effectively wiping the controversial Lion Elastomers ruling off the books and reinstating General Motors’ more employer-friendly framework for deciding when worker language or conduct is so egregious that it loses the protection of the National Labor Relations Act. It shows the impact of new member James Macy giving the Republican majority the third member it needed to change board law.
General Motors calls for the well-worn Wright Line standard, frequently used to determine whether a worker’s rights have been violated, to be the test for analyzing worker outbursts during activities otherwise shielded by the NLRA.
Lion Elastomers had revived three different, context-dependent standards for evaluating extreme worker conduct: one for employee interactions with management in the workplace, another for interactions on the...
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