Minority Unions?

Steven Greenhouse at the New York Times is reporting on the efforts of various unions to convince the NLRB to order employers to bargain with minority unions.  This effort has been spearheaded by Charlie Morris (SMU).  As Greenhouse explains:

This would be a sharp departure from current practices, in which employers are required to bargain with a union only after it shows that a majority of employees at a workplace support it. . . .

The unions involved in the bid, including the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers, say the labor board should return to a largely forgotten practice, prevalent in the 1930s, in which companies often bargained with unions representing only a minority of workers who had joined them. “This is what the text of the National Labor Relations Act requires, and there are no decisions to the contrary,” said Charles J. Morris, an emeritus professor of labor law at Southern Methodist University and the foremost champion of this notion.

Union officials acknowledged that the labor board, currently dominated by appointees of President Bush, would probably not adopt a rule so favorable to unions. But union officials said they were petitioning now in the hope that there will be a Democratic president someday who will appoint a board that will look favorably upon their argument. . . .

The unions’ legal papers note that the steelworkers and auto workers were at first minority, members-only unions at several companies and then obtained good contracts that helped persuade 180,000 other workers to organize as part of majority-backed unions.

Twenty-five law professors wrote to the labor board yesterday in support of the unions’ interpretation of the statute, saying that minority, members-only unions can provide “a useful and often-needed steppingstone to majority-based” unions.

The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, states that unions can be the exclusive bargaining agent for all employees at a workplace only after there is a showing of majority support. But the unions argued yesterday that even when a union does not represent a majority, employers still have a duty to bargain with a minority union, but not on an exclusivity basis representing all employees.

No doubt that the petition will not get a favorable review from the current Board, although with the delays that all too often accompany big cases who knows what the Board will look like when it finally gets to this.  Either way, this is a very interesting argument and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

-JH