U.N. Agency Says NLRB Violates Workers’ Rights

[Earth Bound Misfit]

Source: AFL-CIO Weblog
A key international agency ruled today that the Bush administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is denying workers’ rights in violation of international labor standards.

The International Labor Organization’s (ILO’s) Committee on Freedom of Association held that the NLRB’s definitions of “supervisor” in the Oakwood cases violates freedom of association standards by excluding staff that only occasionally perform supervisory duties from protection of the National Labor Relations Act. The United States is bound to follow international core labor standards as a member of the ILO.

Because the Republican majority on the NLRB has systematically and egregiously reduced the freedom of workers to join unions, the AFL-CIO took the unusual step of filing a complaint with the ILO, an arm of the United Nations, last October.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney welcomed the decision.

The Bush-dominated NLRB has taken every opportunity to arm U.S. employers with the tools to defeat the attempt of workers to gain a voice at work. The ILO’s decision in this case vindicates workers’ rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining, despite the attempts at spinning it by U.S. employers. We will continue to expose the shameful conduct of the U.S. government in every forum available to us as we seek to strengthen the ability of workers to form and join unions.

The ILO in previous years has ruled that other U.S. government decisions violated workers’ rights, including the 2002 Supreme Court’s Hoffman Plastics ruling, which took the unprecedented step of denying an undocumented immigrant worker lost wages after he was illegally fired for exercising his rights under the National Labor Relations Act to form a union.

In another case, the ILO last year held that airport screeners could not be denied the right to form and join unions and engage in collective bargaining, in the name of “national security.”

Full Story: http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/03/19/un-agency-says-nlrb-violates-workers-rights/

[bushmeister0]

1. What a shocker!

They put oil industry lobbyists in charge of the EPA, they put hack scientists in charge of studying global warming, Pharma exects in charge of the FDA, why not use an agency designed to protect workers rights to crush workers rights? It follows, perfectly logical.