The Bush Administration and the Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have made it no secret that they are interested in stripping workers of their rights.  The threat to workers is real:

Here are the facts.  The Bush NLRB has:

• Stripped the right to form unions from graduate research assistants, disabled employees, and temp agency employees.
• Ruled that employers may prohibit communications between workers expressing displeasure over working conditions.  These communications are no longer  assumed to interfere with employee free speech.
• Weakened legal protection against employer threats.
• Allowed employers to ban off-duty fraternization among employees.
• Allowed employers to make unsubstantiated threats about what would happen if a union was formed.
• Allowed employers to retaliate against workers who seek community support for their organizing campaigns.
• Under President Bush, the Department of Labor reclassified broad swaths of workers, denying them the ability to receive overtime pay.  President Bush has also fought to strip tens of thousands of Federal employees of their right to join a union.

Now, Bush's NLRB has made a decision which could allow employers strip up to 8 million more workers of their right to belong to a union by manipulating job descriptions to artificially classify workers as supervisors who are  ineligible for union contract protection.

Overview of this Bush NLRB decision – The "Kentucky River" Decision:

The NLRB ruled on three cases referred to as the "Kentucky River" because they serve to clarify issues left open by the Supreme Court's Kentucky River decision in 2001.  The Board's decision to broadly interpret who is a "supervisor" could allow employers to strip the right to join a union from up to 8 million more workers, simply by manipulating titles and job descriptions.

Until now, the NLRB has always ruled that only people who have the authority to hire, fire, discipline, evaluate, or promote employees are ineligible to join a union because they are supervisors.  The NLRB's decision in the Oakwood Healthcare, Inc. case significantly expands the definition and enables employers to make a supervisor out of any worker who has the authority to assign or direct another and uses independent judgment.  The board also ruled that a worker can be classified as a supervisor if they spend as little as 10-15% of their time overseeing the work of others.  Workers without any authority over working conditions, staffing levels, pay, or any other management power could lose their right to union representation.

The impact is likely to be particularly dramatic in the health care industry, in construction, and in other skilled occupations where it is common for higher skilled workers to play a role in directing the work of lower skilled employees.  For example, registered nurses who tell nurses aides to do certain things for particular patients and journeymen/building trades workers who work with apprentices and helpers on a crew could suddenly find themselves ineligible for union membership. Nurses, construction workers, newspaper and television employees, port workers and many others could be prohibited from forming unions. What's more, longtime union members could suddenly lose union representation when their contracts run out.

More than 60 cases currently pending at the NLRB could be directly impacted by this case, and countless others could follow.

Read more reaction from the labor movement about the decision here.  Read the actual decision here.