Labor Watchdog President is Optimistic About NLRB Proposal to Protect Workers’ Privacy During Unionization Votes

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced on July 28, 2020 a proposed rulemaking change with regards to its election procedures. This proposal would lift a requirement that Obama administration’s NLRB imposed in 2014 that employers must give workers’ private information to union organizers. Such information includes phone numbers and email addresses, even if individual workers are opposed to union organizers gathering such information.

National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix opined that the NLRB’s rule change is a necessary protection for workers’ privacy, which would protect them from union boss coercion:

Today the NLRB takes a necessary step towards ending a gross invasion of workers’ privacy inherent in the Obama Board’s deeply flawed 2014 Ambush Election Rule. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has provided free legal aid to numerous workers victimized by union boss retaliation utilizing workers’ private information, cited the privacy issues with handing over employees’ personal private contact information both in opposition to the 2014 rule and again in 2018 comments to the new NLRB.

The Board should resist any calls to delay or extend its rulemaking deadlines announced today so it can implement these common sense worker privacy protections as swiftly as possible.

The aforementioned ambush election rules were quickly rolled out on December 15, 2014, the final day of former union lawyer Nancy Schiffer’s term on the NLRB. Previously, the NLRB quickly pushed through the regulations before former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) lawyer Craig Becker’s term expired in December 2011. However, these regulations were struck down by a federal district court in 2012 based on procedural grounds.