Article · Labor and Employment
Section 7 Rights in a Non-Union Workplace: Why Ordinary Handbook Rules Get Struck Down
29 U.S.C. § 157
- Type
- Article
- Jurisdiction
- National
- Date
- 2024-10-20
- Topic
- Labor and Employment
Most employers believe the National Labor Relations Act is a statute about unions, and therefore not about them. It is not. Section 7 protects the right of employees to engage in concerted activities for mutual aid or protection whether or not any union is anywhere in sight, and the Board enforces it primarily against non-union employers through the most ordinary documents a company owns: the handbook, the confidentiality policy, the social media policy, the civility rule, and the severance agreement. This article explains what concerted activity is and how thin the requirement is, why the Stericycle standard makes facially neutral work rules presumptively unlawful when a reasonable employee could read them to chill protected activity, and why McLaren Macomb made the confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses in nearly every severance template unlawful to offer. It walks the specific rules that get struck down, the ones that survive, the narrow supervisor exclusion employers over-rely on, the Wright Line framework for discipline, the boundary between protected and unprotected conduct after Lion Elastomers, and the Board's remedial arsenal including consequential damages under Thryv and Section 10(j) injunctions after Starbucks v. McKinney.
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