BUSH NLRB CHAIRMAN’S PARTING ‘GIFT’:
BANNING UNIONS FROM COMPANY E-MAIL

In his parting “gift”--call it a lump of coal--to the nation’s unions, Bush regime National Labor Relations Board Chairman Robert J. Battista provided the key vote in a party-line 3-2 ruling to virtually ban unions from firms’ e-mail.

In a Dec. 16 ruling, the day he left office, Battista--the former management-side labor lawyer from Detroit who represented the publishers during the bitter strike they forced on the Motor City’s newspaper unions several years ago--declared firms have almost unlimited control over uses of their e-mail systems. And the case involved another newspaper, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard.

The case is very important to the labor movement, as it increasingly turns to new Internet-based technology to communicate not just with its own members but with potential members. So the AFL-CIO intervened with a friend-of-the-court brief backing The Newspaper Guild/CWA, which went to bat for its members at the Oregon paper. CWA spokeswoman Candice Johnson said the union has yet to decide its next move.

“Employees have no statutory right to use the respondent’s e-mail system” for collective bargaining purposes, ruled Battista and fellow Bush-named GOP NLRB members Peter Kirsanow and Peter Schaumber. “We therefore find the” Register-Guard’s “policy prohibiting employee use of the system for ‘non-job-related solicitations’ did not violate” labor law, they declared.

The Newspaper Guild, the Communications Workers and the AFL-CIO also pointed out the paper discriminated against copy editor Suzi Prozanski, then the TNG local president, for sending 3 union-related e-mails in 2000. It warned her not to do it again, but did not take any action against other e-mailers, they pointed out.

The Newspaper Guild, the CWA and the AFL-CIO argued that “where an employer allows employees to use the e-mail system to communicate with each other on non-business matters generally, the employees are already rightfully on the employer’s property, in the sense they have been allowed access to the e-mail system.

“Thus, it is the employer’s management interests, not its property interests, that are implicated. The employer may impose a nondiscriminatory restriction on e-mail communications during working time, but may impose additional restrictions only by showing they are necessary to further substantial management interests,” they added.

The GOP majority flatly rejected that argument. “The employer has the basic right to restrict employee use of company property,” it said. That includes bulletin boards, televisions and telephones and e-mail, as long as the firm does not single out unions. The company--any company--would break labor law if it let anti-union workers use the e-mail, but not the union, the majority said.

Dissenting Democratic NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh called the board majority “Rip Van Winkle.”

“Only a board asleep for the past 20 years could fail to recognize e-mail has revolutionized communication both within and outside the workplace. In 2007, one cannot reasonably contend, as the majority does, that an e-mail system is a piece of communications equipment to be treated just as the law treats bulletin boards, telephones, and pieces of scrap paper,” they said.

The e-mail ruling may be one of the board’s last for a while. CWA President Larry Cohen noted that on the same day, Battista’s term expired. Bush did not renomi-nate Battista or name a replacement. That leaves the board with a 2-2 political tie.

And two of its members--one from each party--will see their terms end in January, leaving the NLRB without a quorum to conduct business. Given the NLRB’s anti-worker track record under Battista, though, “We’re better off with a board that can’t act than one that can,” Cohen said.