Guide · Labor and Employment

Labor Relations Under the NLRA: A Comprehensive Guide to Organizing, Bargaining, and Unfair Labor Practices

29 U.S.C. §§ 151

Type
Guide
Jurisdiction
National
Date
2024-01-07
Topic
Labor and Employment

A comprehensive treatment of private-sector labor law for employers, unions, and counsel. Part I builds the statutory architecture: Section 7 rights, the Section 8(a) and 8(b) unfair labor practices, the coverage exclusions including the narrow supervisor definition, and the Board's structure and procedure. Part II covers organizing and elections: how campaigns begin, authorization cards, the representation petition and its timeline, bargaining-unit determination and its oscillating standards, lawful and unlawful employer campaigning under the TIPS framework and Gissel, benefit grants under Exchange Parts, property access under Lechmere and Republic Aviation, the Excelsior list, objections, and the Cemex framework that can produce a bargaining order without an election. Part III covers collective bargaining: exclusive representation, mandatory permissive and illegal subjects, the duty to furnish information, good-faith bargaining and surface bargaining, unilateral change under Katz, impasse and implementation, contract administration and grievance arbitration, and successorship. Part IV covers economic weapons: protected and unprotected strikes, permanent replacement and reinstatement rights, lockouts, picketing limits, and secondary activity. Part V covers union security, dues, and right-to-work. Part VI covers remedies, Section 10(j), and the doctrinal instability that makes verification essential.

Labor Relations Under the NLRA: A Comprehensive Guide to Organizing, Bargaining, and Unfair Labor Practices

Labor and Employment > Labor Relations | Published 7 January 2024 - Updated 8 March 2026 | UpLaw - uplaw.us

In brief. The National Labor Relations Act does three things. It grants employees a right to act collectively about working conditions, whether or not a union is involved. It creates a mechanism for employees to select an exclusive representative and compels the employer to bargain with it in good faith. And it channels the resulting economic conflict — strikes, replacements, lockouts, picketing — into a set of rules about which weapons are permitted and when. Everything in this guide is an elaboration of one of those three. The persistent difficulty for practitioners is that the elaborations change: much of the operative doctrine is Board decisional law that reverses with the Board's composition, so the discipline is to know the framework durably and verify the current rule every time.

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