Tag Archive for: decertification

NLRB signals willingness to revisit its Settlement Bar doctrine

In a footnote to a recent decision, two current NLRB members signaled a willingness to revisit its Settlement Bar doctrine.

Under its Settlement Bar doctrine, the Board has held that workers may not attempt to “decertify” a union for at least a “reasonable” period of time after their employer has entered into an agreement to bargain. Decertification is the process, at the NLRB, whereby workers can vote a union “out.” The purpose of the Settlement Bar doctrine is to allow the union a “reasonable” time to prove its value to the workers by negotiating a collective bargaining agreement. The Board explained this rule in its 2017 decision, CTS Construction, Inc.:

Under the Board’s settlement bar doctrine, as stated in Poole Foundry & Machine Co., 95 NLRB 34 (1951), enfd. 192 F.2d 740 (4th Cir. 1951), and its progeny, an employer that enters into a settlement agreement requiring it to bargain with a union must bargain for a reasonable period of time before the union’s majority status can be questioned. In deciding whether the parties have bargained for a reasonable period of time, the Board considers the following five factors: whether the parties were bargaining for an initial agreement; the complexity of the issues negotiated and the parties’ bargaining procedures; the total amount of time elapsed since the commencement of bargaining and the number of bargaining sessions; the amount of progress made in negotiations and how near the parties were to agreement; and the presence or absence of a bargaining impasse.

In this recent case, two of the Board members said in a footnote that they were applying the current Settlement Bar doctrine in this case but only for precedential reasons. They cautioned that they would be willing to jettison the Board’s approach in a future case.

Stay tuned to the Board’s decisions to see if it does indeed abandon its current Settlement Bar doctrine.

Source: Krise Transportation, Inc.