While documenting our failing labor law system is crucial making the case for reform, sometimes I have to take a step back. We still need to convince the broader public that unions play a vital role in today’s economy. 

Fresh from the national conference of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), I'm armed with more examples of how unions work to benefit a community larger than their own members:

• A partnership between union members and the Veterans Health Administration allowed crucial input from nurses during collective bargaining, enabling the smooth introduction of a computerized system for administering medication. The new system led to a 70 percent reduction in medication errors. 

• At the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, the labor-management partnership improved quality of care by allowing increased input from front-line workers. Results included a decline in hospital-borne infections and a decrease in response time to patients in trauma.

• Then there’s the untold story of the AFL-CIO's Gulf Coast project. The $1 billion effort to revitalize and rebuild the post-Hurricane Katrina Gulf Coast is a touching example of unions investing resources where they’re needed most—even in areas with very low union membership.

Still need another reason to believe in this country's labor movement? Just ask renowned economist Paul Krugman:

On the eve of his expiring term, the NLRB's Chairman Robert Battista offers a generous parting gift to anti-union employers and a cruel kiss-off to hard-working men and women.  The latest assault on workers by the Bush-appointed majority of the National Labor Relations Board:  a precedent-setting ruling allowing an employer to ban union-related email communications. 

In a 3-2 decision, the Labor Board ruled that use of an employer's email system for union members' communications is no longer a protected right.  Battista and two other Bush-appointed members argued that because the union members can still communicate face-to-face, the employer can decide to ban use of company email for union communications. The dissenting board members argue such communication in today's modern workplace should be protected speech, because email should be no different from " a telephone, a television set, a bulletin board, or a slip of scrap paper."

We've received great interest from other blogs since launching Eye on the NLRB last week.

AFL-CIO Now, Change to Win Connect, David Sirota, FACE Talk (from the American Federation of Teachers), the American Constitution Society blog, the Workplace Prof Blog, and R. Enochs, Esq. all gave some love to our launch and helped call attention to why it’s so important to keep these labor law decisions on our radar screen.

Chris Bowers at Open Left took it a step further and gave some in-depth coverage to the Congressional hearings on the NLRB, while Current Employment commented on the uproar over the NLRB's “September Steamroll.”

And Surviving the Workday caught on to Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson’s insight into what’s really going on over there at the Labor Board.

Thanks to all of you who helped welcome us to the blogosphere, and keep your eyes here for our continued scrutiny of the NLRB.

For you National Labor Relations Board novices, 1 NLRB 1 is the notation for the NLRB’s very first case.  In its first ruling in 1935, the Labor Board decided that when workers are illegally fired or refused employment because of their union support, it is the employer’s burden to demonstrate why the fired employee doesn’t deserve backpay from the date of the violation until the offer of reinstatement.

This precedent stood for 72 years—until the Bush Board reversed it, limiting backpay rights for workers who take a job with the intention of trying to form a union, commonly known as “salts.”  And it’s just one of many decided by the Bush Board that demonstrates its eagerness to reverse precedent and narrow workers’ rights without justification.

In his testimony before last week’s Congressional hearing, NLRB Chairman Robert Battista defended the Board’s reversal of decades of precedent: “Our Board, indeed, has reversed precedent but not as frequently as the Board did during the years 1994 to 2001.” 

Yet the issue is not the number of reversals, but the rationale for the Bush Board’s dramatic overhaul of the law.

It's not every day that a labor law blogger has the thrill of watching Congress put the National Labor Relations Board on the hot seat.  Each time I revisit the testimony from last week’s joint House and Senate subcommittee hearing, I find new layers of this story to share. 

In a letter to Congress added to the hearing record by Senator Kennedy, a majority of U.S. labor law professors lambasted the Bush Board’s record:

The Congresses that enacted and amended the NLRA from 1935 to 1959 viewed collective bargaining as an essential way to maintain and expand America’s middle class.  This Board’s decisions, significantly eroding workers’ ability to gain the right to bargain with their employer for a better future, highlight the need for legislative reform and for a return by the current Board to its statutory mandate.  We call upon Congress to address both of these urgent needs.

Following Thursday’s Congressional hearing on the National Labor Relations Board, there are signs that news media outlets have heard the growing opposition to the disastrous decisions of the NLRB.

Check out some choice quotes and a few highlights from the news coverage:

Robert Battista came clean today.  The Chairman of the National Labor Relations Board admitted before a joint subcommittee hearing of the Senate and House that that he no longer believes that the primary purpose of the National Labor Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining. 

While for years I’ve written that this Board is more concerned with management rights than with the rights of workers to have a union contract, I’m surprised Battista publicly articulated that his Board gives less weight to the promotion of collective bargaining than what the NLRA’s drafters originally intended.

After several members of the subcommittees charged that the Bush Labor Board has failed to uphold this original purpose, Battista implied that the Taft-Hartley Amendment of 1947 repealed the primary goal of the NLRA, which had been to promote collective bargaining.  

Labor Board Member Wilma Liebman, who has dissented from the many anti-worker decisions by the Board, countered Battista’s “revisionist history.”  She argued that the original language still stands and that this shift away from promoting collective bargaining was a “dramatic policy decision” that no Board has previously made:  

The Board is notorious for its seesawing with every change of Administration. But something different is going on – more 'sea change' than 'see-saw.'  The current Board, it seems to me, is divorced from the National Labor Relations Act, its values, and its goals.

Reading from the NLRA’s preamble, she reinforced her point that in no way did Taft-Hartley diminish the primary purpose of the Act.

More highlights from the hearing...

This is how Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson aptly described the prevalence of “counter-regulatory regulators” in the Bush administration, with the anti-worker National Labor Relations Board as a prime example. 

Meyerson spoke at today’s meeting of the DC chapter of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, where he continued to impress me with his ability to include labor law issues in the big picture discussion of income inequality.  He argued that the abysmal state of labor law and need for reform should be front and center in the progressive agenda of those seeking office in 2008.  The case for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, Meyerson argued, is to both “empower American workers…in the workplace,” and to “rebuild broadly shared prosperity that was the national testament to the greatness of democracy.” 

For over three years, American Rights at Work has published “Workers’ Rights Watch: Eye on the NLRB,” publicizing the insufficiency of U.S. labor law while raising awareness of a little-known agency making critical decisions affecting workers' lives and freedoms.

I’m excited to share that we are re-launching this publication as a blog, allowing me to post more frequent and timely commentary on NLRB decisions, and to generate more attention to decisions which make the case for labor law reform.

You can find Eye on the NLRB at www.eyeonthenlrb.org.