What Private Employers Need to Know To Avoid NLRB Attention - The National Law Review
Employers, it seems, can't catch a break these days.
They build businesses. They take risks. They face increasing supply costs, supply-chain problems, interest rates, and staff-shortages. Yet they create jobs and provide employees with livelihoods and opportunities. Surely, if you're an employer or help to operate or manage one, you might wonder, "Is it too much to ask, in exchange for all that, that our employees not trash how we operate in the local media?"
The answer to that question – as with much in the law – is frustrating but accurate: "That depends."
The MasTec Case
Just ask MasTec, which bills itself as "one the largest and most diversified U.S. infrastructure services providers in the country" with about "25,000 employees in more than 500 locations across the United States." Its services include employing "service technicians" to DIRECTV to install satellite TV receivers. Its fields of "expertise," it says, include "Communications."
That's ironic, given what the National Labor Relations Board ("NLRB" or the "Board") has recently communicated to anyone with a smartphone about what MasTec allegedly did when its employees communicated in a way that the company didn’t like.
The Board, on June 30, 2022, announced that the company had recently "agreed to pay 26 former employees $3.12 million in back pay, interest, and expenses," arising from a dispute that began in 2006. The saga, according to the NLRB's news release, started
when 26 service...
Read Full Story: https://www.natlawreview.com/article/labor-unions-and-protected-concerted-act...