8-11-05,10:18am

Aug. 5—In a slap in the face to America’s workers, the Republican-dominated National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled employers can ban off-duty interaction among co-workers—a clear attack on an individual’s right to freedom of association, speech and privacy, according to American Rights at Work, a nonprofit group advocating to restore workers’ freedom to form unions.

The June 7 decision came in the case of Guardsmark, a national security firm that imposed a rule directing employees not to “fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees or with co-employees.” In September 2003, workers filed unfair labor practice charges against Guardsmark, saying the company’s rules inhibited its employees’ rights under federal labor law to form, join or assist unions. Federal labor law allows employers to ban association among co-workers during work hours, but Guardsmark’s regulations banned off-duty association of co-workers as well.

“The NLRB gives employers the green light to invade our privacy and chip away at our most basic rights in the workplace,” says David Bonior, chairman of American Rights at Work.

The Republican majority of the board argued workers likely would interpret the rule as merely a ban on dating, not a prohibition of the association among co-workers protected by the law. But the dissenting member, Democratic-appointee Wilma Liebman, said because the rule already specifies dating, workers logically would understand fraternization to mean something else, such as their freedom to associate and form unions. Bush NLRB Decision Latest in Series of Attacks on Workers’ Basic Rights The Guardsmark decision is the latest in a series of NLRB rulings that restrict workers’ freedom to form unions. Last November, in a partisan 3–2 vote, the board effectively eliminated the right of temporary agency workers to form unions by ruling that temporary agency workers cannot be included in a bargaining unit with permanent employees unless both the temporary agency and the client’s employer consent and the permanent employer consents.

That decision showed the “onerous climate in which the board is increasingly siding with employers over workers and denying workers their federally protected rights to form unions,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

In July 2004, the board ruled graduate assistants are students, not employees, and not entitled to the protections of federal labor law.

“No flawed labor board decision can erase the fact that the freedom to form unions is a fundamental human right. When the government takes away federally sanctioned avenues to form unions, America’s workers will organize nonetheless,” Sweeney said.

The fallout from that decision already has begun. New York University (NYU) officials announced Aug. 5 they would no longer recognize UAW Local 2110 as the bargaining representative for about 1,000 graduate assistants when the current contract expires Aug. 31. NYU was the first private university to recognize a union for graduate assistants.