Fact sheet: Employers are charged with violating federal law in nearly 40% of union elections

Employers often make use of unlawful ways to suppress unions. An evaluation of the newest authorities information on unfair labor follow costs and union elections exhibits that employers had been charged with violating federal labor regulation in almost 40% of elections—all the pieces from firing to retaliation to altering work phrases. The information don’t present the extent of employer aggression as a result of lacking from the numbers are makes an attempt by administration to suppress unionization earlier than employees even get an opportunity to carry an election.

Abstract

Utilizing Nationwide Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election information between 2019 and 2022 and unfair labor follow (ULP) filings from 2018 by 2022, we discovered that employers had been often alleged to have engaged in unfair labor practices across the time of elections. Employers had been charged with violating federal labor regulation in 4 out of each 10 union elections (39%). A violation was outlined as having a minimum of one ULP cost that was related to a given election.

Expenses embrace:

• Firings. Utilizing essentially the most complete measure of firings, employers had been charged with illegally firing employees in a single in 4 election filings (24%). A narrower measure of firings suggests 1 in 7 elections (14%) contained an unlawful firing cost.

• Coercion, threats, retaliations. In 1 / 4 of elections (27%), employers had been charged with illegally coercing, threatening, or retaliating in opposition to employees for supporting a union.

• Self-discipline, firings, adjustments in work phrases. In certainly one of each 4 elections (24%) employers had been charged with illegally disciplining employees for supporting a union.

• Employers had been extra more likely to be charged with violating the regulation when there was a bigger bargaining unit. In accomplished elections involving 50 or extra staff (25% of elections), about half of employers (48%) had been charged with labor regulation violations.

To measure employer interference with union election campaigns, we adopted the methodology of McNicholas et al. (2019). We matched two separate datasets—NLRB election filings between January 2020 and Might 2022 and NLRB information on ULP costs between January 2019 and Might 2022—and assumed that ULP costs and NLRB elections had been associated in the event that they shared the identical employer identify, metropolis and state.

Obtain the Unlawful Fact Sheet here