National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Crystal S. Carey has identified a series of major labor-law precedents she wants the Board to reconsider, while emphasizing that her immediate priority remains reducing the agency’s case backlog.
In an Aug. 26 memorandum, Carey said she has deliberately avoided requiring regional offices to send specified categories of cases to the Division of Advice. Instead, regions should continue investigating and prosecuting cases under existing Board law while potential vehicles for changing precedent make their way through the agency.
Carey said the approach has helped the NLRB complete investigations in 9,247 cases that were pending when she took office, reducing by more than 50% the number of cases awaiting determinations in regional offices.
For employers, however, the memo also provides a roadmap of significant changes Carey hopes to make to recent NLRB precedent.
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Perhaps the most consequential involves employer work rules. Carey is arguing in Honeywell International Inc. that the Board should overturn its 2023 Stericycle decision.
Under Stericycle, an employer’s workplace rule can be illegal if employees could reasonably read it as discouraging them from exercising their labor rights — even if the rule does not specifically mention unions or protected activity. For example, a broadly worded rule telling employees not to make negative comments about the...
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