Dive Brief:
- Employers who value employee input concerning ideas for improving a business or business process could be breaking federal labor law, according to SHRM.
- Specifically, two statutory provisions – Section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and Section 302 Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) – represent stumbling blocks when it comes to asking employers for their perspective.
- The NLRA section forbids employers from “dominating or interfering with the formation or administration” of a “labor organization.” While no labor union organizing may be happening, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and courts have applied it to all kinds of employee participation programs, according to the SHRM article.
Dive Insight:
At a recent summit, for example, SHRM reports that President Barack Obama offered a hypothetical example of an employee group telling their employer that they must moonlight to make ends meet. He suggested that if that employer provided paid sick leave, it would have a good ROI because of increased loyalty.
Yet, write authors Tara Mahoney and Allison Drutchas, labor attorneys with the Honigman law firm in Detroit, programs designed to foster input from employees could be considered "labor organizations that are dominated by management," which violates the NLRA.
To provide clear examples of how the law works, Mahoney and Drutchas outline a few specific cases where employee participation programs were shut down by judges who decided they were labor organizations dominated by management. The attorneys note that NLRA Section 8(a)(2) and LMRA Section 302 cases are unusual. But HR leaders or business line managers thinking about expanding employee input via employee participation programs should make sure they are not crossing these lines.
