Supervisors of the World Unite! The NLRB Tells Nurses and Professionals Which Side They Are On
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Abstract
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued the long awaited Oakwood Healthcare, Inc. decision, holding that registered nurses who nominally coordinate and guide the work of other nurses or health care workers are supervisory personnel who fall outside the coverage of the National Labor Relations Act. Oakwood Healthcare is a seminal NLRB decision, articulating a remarkably expansive rule for determining whether or not an employee is a supervisor. By radically redifining who is a worker and who is a boss, Oakwood Healthcare has the potential to do what no other single case in the history of the NLRB has ever done - deprive more than eight million professionals and skilled workers of their right to join a labor union. If Oakwood Healthcare is not reversed by the federal courts or undermined by statutory labor law reform, as many as eight million professional employees and skilled workers will join the 32 million memebers of the U.S. workforce--one out of four workers--who, according to the General Accounting Office, do not have the legal right to join unions. As dissenting Board member Wilma Liebman ominously noted, Oakwood Healthcare creates a class of workers existing in a legal limbo "hav(ing) neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees."
Recommended Citation
10 Working USA: J. Labor & Soc'y 133 (2007)
