Great news from the House of Representatives yesterday -- the RESPECT Act has been passed by the House Education and Labor Committee:
A House panel moved Wednesday to make it harder for companies to classify workers as supervisors and thus exempt them from union protection.
With majority Democrats holding sway, the House Education and Labor Committee voted 26-20 to adopt a bill that would overturn a 2006 National Labor Relations Board decision covering a series of cases known as the Kentucky River cases.
The board had ruled in those cases that nurses who regularly run shifts at health care facilities should be considered supervisors and should be exempt from federal protections that cover union membership.
The "Kentucky River cases" (Oakwood Healthcare Inc., Golden Crest Healthcare Center, and Croft Metals, Inc.) were a set of decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that classified nurses as "supervisors" even if they only perform supervisory functions in a tiny fraction of their time, such as by taking a shift as a "charge nurse" one night a week on a rotating basis. The classification is important because, under current law, "supervisors" don't have the same protected rights to join together in unions that regular employees do.
By giving employers an unbelievably broad definition of "supervisor", then, Kentucky River gave a new weapon to those employers who want to frustrate their workers' desire to join together in unions by any means necessary. The RESPECT Act (H.R.1644), which is the bill that was passed by the Education and Labor Committee, restores the rights of those workers by making it clear who is really a supervisor and who isn't:
Under the legislation, workers would have to spend the majority of their time doing supervisory duties to fit the classification. It would also eliminate the words "assign" and "responsibility to direct" from the supervisory duties in the National Labor Relations Act.
Here's our official statement, and the committee's news release.
