A Clear Roadmap – Trump’s NLRB Gives Employers More Guidance on Handbooks

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is a federal law that protects employees’ right to engage in concerted activity. Although the NLRA is commonly thought of as protecting employees’ right to form a labor union, which it does, it also protects the right to engage in other concerted activities that may have nothing to do with unions. ‘Concerted activity’ is a broad term and refers to any action employees take together for their mutual aid and protection, such as when two employees go together to HR to complain about their supervisor, or when an individual employee speaks on behalf of himself and his co-workers to demand they all get a raise. The NLRA applies to all employers, whether unionized or not.

 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is the federal agency responsible for enforcing the NLRA. It has long held that employer policies or rules that interfere with the right to engage in concerted activity violate the NLRA. In 2004, however, the board, in its Lutheran Heritage decision, expanded the NLRA’s protections by ruling that work rules not intended or used to target concerted activity would nevertheless be unlawful if an employee could “reasonably construe” the rule to prohibit concerted activity.

 

Under the Obama administration, the board relied on the ‘reasonably construe’ standard to declare unlawful a number of commonplace rules. For example, the NLRB found that policies asking employees to refrain from negative comments about co-workers and managers and asking employees to represent the company in the community in a positive and professional manner were unlawful because employees could interpret the policies to restrict their rights to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment.  At the same time, the board held similar rules to be lawful, such as a rule prohibiting “disloyal, disruptive, competitive, or damaging conduct.”

 

These decisions created confusion for employers. Without a clear standard as to when a rule would be considered legal, employers wondered whether common-sense rules that had long been part of company culture would be declared illegal by the NLRB.

 

NLRB members are appointed by the president, and, unsurprisingly, the members appointed by President Trump have been friendlier to employers. Late last year, the NLRB issued a decision (The Boeing Company, 365 NLRB No. 154) that established a new standard for evaluating the legality of employer rules. Under this new standard, the board will weigh the interests of the employer in maintaining work rules against the impact of those rules on employees’ right to engage in concerted activity. 

 

In its decision, the board noted that, “over the past decade and one-half, the board has invalidated a large number of common-sense rules and requirements that most people would reasonably expect every employer to maintain.”

 

The board’s general counsel also issued a memorandum this past June that provides further guidance to employers on how handbook rules should be interpreted under the new standard. The general counsel instructed that the board’s regional directors and other officers should not be interpreting general work rules “as banning all activity that could conceivably be included.” He then grouped common handbook policies into three categories:

 

• Civility rules;

 

• Rules prohibiting photography or recording;

 

• Insubordination, non-cooperation, and refusal-to-cooperate rules;

 

• Disruptive-behavior rules;

 

• Rules protecting disclosure of confidential, proprietary, and customer information (as long as they don’t reference wage or employee information);

 

• Rules against defamation or misrepresentation;

 

• Rules prohibiting use of the employer’s logos or intellectual property;

 

• Rules requiring authorization to speak on behalf of the company; and

 

• Rules banning disloyalty, nepotism, or self-enrichment.

 

 

 

These rules are not clearly lawful or unlawful. Instead, the lawfulness of these types of rules must be determined on a case-by-case basis:

 

• Broad conflict-of-interest rules;

 

• Confidentiality rules that encompass ‘employer business’ or employee information;

 

• Rules preventing disparagement of the employer;

 

• Rules prohibiting or regulating use of the employer’s name (as opposed to employer logos or trademarks);

 

• Rules restricting employees from generally speaking to the media;

 

• Rules banning off-duty conduct that would harm the employer; and

 

• Rules prohibiting making false statements (as opposed to defamation).

 

 

 

• Confidentiality rules regarding wages, benefits, or working conditions; and

 

• Rules that prohibit joining outside organizations or that require employees to refrain from voting on matters concerning the employer.