SC Overturns Key Pro-Union NLRB Decision

[Nathan Newman]

A recent Supreme Court decision got little play in the news, but it is one
of the most devastating for health care organizing in recent years.
Hospitals have often tried to undermine union organizing of nurses by giving
registered nurses nominal supervisory duties with no real power, then
claiming they were supervisors ineligible for unionization.   The
Clinton-appointed NLRB had ruled in a key case, Kentucky Community Care,
that "ordinary professional or technical judgment in directing less-skilled"
by employees would not thereby classify those employees as supervisors and
therefore bar them from being able to unionize.  This decision was applied
to registered nurses and was an important decision protecting the rights of
registered nurses.

The 6th Circuit overturned the decision of the NLRB and the Supreme Court on
May 29th by the usual 5-4 split affirmed the decision to bar unionization of
registered nurses with even nominal oversight of other nurses.

See NLRB v. KENTUCKY RIVER COMMUNITY CARE, INC., etal
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=000
&invol=99-1815

As the four liberal Court dissenters noted, the nurses in question had "no
authority to take any action if the employee refuse[d] their directives" yet
the Court denied them all protection of labor law.  In what is becoming
typical Justice Stevens language excortiating the rightwing Five, he wrote:

"However, in a tour de force supported by little more than ipse dixit, the
Court concludes that no deference is due the Boards evaluation of the kind
of judgment that professional employees exercise...The Courts approach finds
no support in the text of the statute, and is inconsistent with our case
law."

 The result of this decision is to leave registered nurses unprotected by
labor law and allow management to threaten them with termination if they do
not assist in breaking unionization by other nurses and health care workers
they work with.  It also kills pretty much any attempt to organize doctors
in private hospitals.  The AMA's recently created labor unit announced the
folding of efforts in private hospitals solely in response to this decision.

For those who say the Supreme Court makes little difference or the Clinton
labor board made little difference, the fact remains that the Clinton board
consistently expanded the scope of which workers had protection under labor
law, from graduate students to temp workers to registered nurses.  And the
rightwing-dominated courts have done everything possible to undermine those
pro-labor decisions.

-- Nathan Newman