After witnessing the perversion of Robb's NLRB tenure , it's very satisfying for me to see the perversions end . President Biden has begun to fulfill his promise to labor . Thanks Joe.
I'm also hopeful that in the future legislation can be passed keeping the NLRB out of the hands of anti - Union and anti- CBA adherents.
Lost in the shuffle of the substantive withdrawal of anti-union memoranda is perhaps the most important repudiation of all of these-- the withdrawal of the egregious "snitch memo," GC 20-08, which forced Regional Office investigators to turn over secretly-made recordings (most commonly of captive-audience meetings and investigatory interviews), potentially exposing the employees who made those recordings to direct and indirect retaliation. It compounded this by ordering those investigators to tell the employees what they were going to do and, in effect, coerce them NOT to voluntarily provide critical evidence for those investigations-- evidence which the Regions, had they been doing their jobs properly (admittedly something Robb sought fervently to prevent), would have been subpoenaing anyway if the witnesses turned reluctant. Instead, one suspects many of these charges were simply dismissed for "lack of cooperation."
What made that memo so insidious is that it directly sought to undermine trust between the Board's investigators and its witnesses. That trust is already hard enough to establish in a lot of cases-- people are fearful, confused, don't speak English very well (or at all, sometimes), and so on. Telling people "if you give us your evidence, we're going to rat you out to your employer and leave you twisting in the wind" is just incredibly damaging to the relationships that need to be built in order to win cases.
I'd like to see the new Board, once it's fully constituted, make rules that not only try to prevent this sort of behavior in future, but clearly preempt any state wiretap statutes that would otherwise purport to bar this sort of recording.
After witnessing the perversion of Robb's NLRB tenure , it's very satisfying for me to see the perversions end . President Biden has begun to fulfill his promise to labor . Thanks Joe.
I'm also hopeful that in the future legislation can be passed keeping the NLRB out of the hands of anti - Union and anti- CBA adherents.
Lost in the shuffle of the substantive withdrawal of anti-union memoranda is perhaps the most important repudiation of all of these-- the withdrawal of the egregious "snitch memo," GC 20-08, which forced Regional Office investigators to turn over secretly-made recordings (most commonly of captive-audience meetings and investigatory interviews), potentially exposing the employees who made those recordings to direct and indirect retaliation. It compounded this by ordering those investigators to tell the employees what they were going to do and, in effect, coerce them NOT to voluntarily provide critical evidence for those investigations-- evidence which the Regions, had they been doing their jobs properly (admittedly something Robb sought fervently to prevent), would have been subpoenaing anyway if the witnesses turned reluctant. Instead, one suspects many of these charges were simply dismissed for "lack of cooperation."
What made that memo so insidious is that it directly sought to undermine trust between the Board's investigators and its witnesses. That trust is already hard enough to establish in a lot of cases-- people are fearful, confused, don't speak English very well (or at all, sometimes), and so on. Telling people "if you give us your evidence, we're going to rat you out to your employer and leave you twisting in the wind" is just incredibly damaging to the relationships that need to be built in order to win cases.
I'd like to see the new Board, once it's fully constituted, make rules that not only try to prevent this sort of behavior in future, but clearly preempt any state wiretap statutes that would otherwise purport to bar this sort of recording.
Great point and helpful comment. Thanks for expounding on the importance of GC 20-08.