Was display featuring “tombstones” of closed plants a threat or a prediction?
✍ Scribed by Alfred T. DeMaria
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Weight
- 252 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0745-4880
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Was Display Featuring CLTombstones" of Closed Plants a Threat or a Prediction?
The union's inability to provide job security was a major employer theme during a campaign by the United Auto Workers to represent employees at a midwestern manufacturer. When the union lost the election, it charged that management had gone over the line in its presentation of this theme-right into the territory of unfair labor practices. The lack of consensus among Board fact finders regarding this case shows how subtle questions and behaviors color judgments on what is permissible in employer campaign communications on the theme of job security and unions. (Eldorado Tool, Division of Quamco, 325 NLRB No. 16,156 LRRM 1241, 11/9/97)
"Wall of Shame"
Among the management communications at issue was a display that the company entitled "Wall of Shame." UAW-organized plants that had closed were represented on the "wall" in the form of 2-foot by %foot paper tombstones. The company added a tombstone every day or two; including, the day before the election, a tombstone that bore the name of its own plant and had a question mark in the middle.
After the union lost the election, it charged that the "Wall of Shame" was unfair because it threatened workers with plant closing if they chose to unionize.
The Board's administrative law judge (ALJ) found that the substantive part of the display was factual, since the plants depicted were represented by the UAW when they closed. The title of the display implied that the closings were the UAWs fault, the ALJ found, but he concluded that the employer was "free to advise its employees that certain unionized plants have closed without stating more. . . .,, During the month before the election, the union distributed a flyer and an open letter to employees in an attempt to counter the employer's display, the ALJ noted, adding that such communication "was the way it should be in a representation election campaign.