Providing for Congressional Disapproval of the Rule Submitted by the NLRB Relating to Representation Election Procedures -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. BLUMENTHAL. Mr. President, I join the distinguished leader of the committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in opposing S.J. Res. 36 and supporting the National Labor Relations Board rule that would very simply modernize the process that workers use to decide whether they want to form a union.

Right from the start, let's be very clear about what is at stake. It is a rule that the National Labor Relations Board has formulated pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act set by the Congress of the United States after comment that was solicited from all of the relevant stakeholders and people who would be affected by it, and they are rules that are long overdue because of the inconsistency and delays that are endemic to the current process.

As I travel around the State of Connecticut and I hear from people around the country, I consistently hear about problems that exist under the present process for choosing a union. This rule does not determine the outcome; rather, it simply modernizes and improves the process, and it does it by a rulemaking process that is consistent with and pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, which is the way the Congress has said it should be done. In fact, it adopts the rulemaking procedure rather than doing it by individual cases, which is the way the U.S. Supreme Court and the courts of appeal have said to the Board it should do more often. So, far from raising constitutional questions or issues of procedural lack of process, the NLRB has acted in accordance with the will of the Congress and the Constitution in formulating this rule.

Why is it necessary? Well, for one thing, there are 34 regional offices of the National Labor Relations Board, and each of them has different policies and practices for processing election petitions. We are talking about petitions that are submitted by workers who want to form a union and can do so by election when at least 30 percent of those employees send the petition to the NLRB. The gap in time is an opportunity for intimidation by unscrupulous employers. Fortunately, they are a small minority of employers--but they exist--who wish to discourage or deter workers from forming a union. That intimidation is unacceptable. We should do everything we can to stop it.

Second, the delays themselves are intolerable. Some of those delays are years--as long as 13 years in some instances--and the gap in time discourages or deters the exercise of rights that are guaranteed under the law.

So this new rule is simply to modernize the process, end intimidation, and make sure that rights are made real, in real time, so that employees can exercise those rights without any discouragement from employers.

Are the employers free to communicate with workers? Of course they are. The rights of communication on the part of the employers are not eliminated by any means. Are they still part of the process? Yes, indeed, employers remain a part of the process if they wish to be. The effort here--in fact, as one of the employers who submitted comments to the NLRB said quite pointedly--from Catholic Healthcare West, a health care company with 31,000 employees, in its comments: ``Reforms proposed by the NLRB are not pro union or pro business, they are pro modernization'' and will ``modernize the representation election process by improving the board's current representation election procedures that result in unnecessary delays, allow unnecessary litigation, and fail to take advantage of modern communication technologies.''

That quote from an employer really says it all.

Some of the litigation is not only against the interests of employees, it also is costly to the employers, especially when it fails to succeed. It creates uncertainties for other employers, and it can block representation and lead again to unnecessary delays.

This rule has an impact on real people in Connecticut and around the country. To give you a couple of examples, registered nurses who are at a number of the hospitals in Connecticut have come to me about the need to reform this process. Members of the employee workforce at T-Mobile, for example--Chris Cozza, a technician at T-Mobile USA in Connecticut, joined with 14 colleagues, came to me to recount his experience. He filed for union representation with the support of the Communications Workers of America, the CWA. He experienced problems of exactly this kind because his rights were delayed and thereby almost denied. When T-Mobile USA filed a claim that officially challenged the status of the CWA as a labor organization, he could see--Chris Cozza and all of us could see--that clearly CWA is a labor organization. This tactic was simply a delaying one, and the NLRB rule would prevent the kind of frivolous challenges and frivolous litigation that occurred there.

Let me conclude by saying, as has been said already, this rule is neither prounion or proemployer. It is simply profairness. It is antidelay, antifrivolous litigation, and it is profairness in the workplace.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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