New Labor Board Rules Are An Affront To Workplace Democracy

"You may have heard of the National Labor Relations Board’s new “ambush election” rule—so-called because it hurriedly schedules union elections within as little as two weeks, depriving employers of the time needed to learn about the union and express their views to employees. 

"But what you may not know is that the rule requires an employer to provide union organizers with the personal cellphone numbers and email addresses of its employees before they vote in a union election. So much for the right to privacy. 

"It doesn’t seem to matter to the Obama-era NLRB that a worker may have provided this personal information on condition that it be kept confidential and used only in an emergency. Nor does it matter to the board that union organizers may use the information to bombard the worker with pro-union messages and demands anywhere, anytime."

Article here:  http://www.wsj.com/articles/workplace-democracy-gets-ambushed-1438211313

AT&T can punish employees for wearing ‘prisoner’ T-shirts to work, appeals court rules, overruling NLRB

Chalk one up for "common sense" in the Age of Idiocracy . . . 

AT&T didn't break the law when it forbade its technicians and other public-facing employees from wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Inmate" and "Prisoner of AT$T," a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The ruling overturns a decision by the National Labor Relations Board and permits AT&T to ban the donning of negative T-shirts under an exception to the nation's labor laws.

The case began when AT&T suspended 183 Connecticut workers who refused to take off the offending shirts. The union that represents AT&T employees, the Communications Workers of America, accused the company of unfair labor practices.

Writing for the court, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said that it was "common sense" for AT&T to want to avoid having customers see their employees walking around with those shirts on.

It seems the NLRB could not grasp this concept.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/07/10/att-is-allowed-to-ban-workers-from-wearing-t-shirts-saying-inmate-on-them-court-rules/

Americans Not In The Labor Force Soar By 640,000 To Record 93.6 Million; Participation Rate Drops To 1977 Levels

The devastation of the US labor force continues.

In what was an "unambiguously" unpleasant June jobs payrolls report, with both April and May jobs revised lower, the fact that the number of Americans not in the labor force soared once again, this time by a whopping 640,000 or the most since April 2014 to a record 93.6 million, with the result being a participation rate of 62.6 or where itt was in September 1977, will merely catalyze even more upside to the so called "market" which continues to reflect nothing but central bank liquidity, and thus - the accelerating deterioration of the broader economy.

Article and charts here:  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-02/americans-not-labor-force-soar-640000-record-936-million-participation-rate-drops-19