Earlier this year, the Acting General Counsel met with the Practice and Procedure Committee of the American Bar Association’s Labor and Employment Law Section. This meeting is an annual undertaking. The AGC answered questions the Committee collected from labor law practitioners around the country.
Earlier this month, the AGC released a memorandum (pdf) summarizing the questions that were posed to him and the answers he provided. The memorandum covers a broad range of topics, far too broad to cover effectively in this post. Labor professionals with a particular interest in practice and procedure issues in front of the NLRB will want to review the memorandum in detail.
Some of the more noteworthy topics covered in the memorandum are listed below. The parenthetical reference is to the page(s) in the memorandum on which the discussion appears:
- The only additional rulemaking activity under review at this time are the portions of the election rule that were originally proposed, but which were not included in the final rule when published in December 2011 (pp. 22, 26);
- The AGC has no plan to issue any further guidance on social media policies (as he has done three previous times), but cases involving rules for use of an employer’s computer or e-mail systems must be submitted to Washington, D.C. for advice (pp. 16-17);
- A statistical summary of the use, and outcomes of, subpoenas issued by the regional offices in the course of investigating unfair labor practice charges (pp. 6-9);
- An extensive discussion of the routine use of default language in settlement agreements with the NLRB (pp. 10-16), including a discussion of the cases where the use of this language has been litigated (p. 10-11) as well as cases where regional directors have agreed to modify the default language (p. 12);
- A review of bargaining unit decisions under Specialty Healthcare (pp. 22-23); and
- A discussion of the use of mail ballots in union elections and holding such elections someplace other than the employer’s place of business (pp. 19-20).