The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning (PDF) that President Barack Obama lacked the constitutional authority to unilaterally appoint three people to the five-member labor board during a Senate recess in January 2012. Canning is a Yakima, Wash.-based beverage distributor who protested an NLRB order to honor a union agreement by arguing that the NLRB lacked a quorum to make decisions since three of its members were appointed illegally.
Obama since has been able to win Senate confirmation of his appointees and the board has a full complement of three Democratic appointees and two Republican appointees. But Thursday's ruling means the board will have to reconsider hundreds of cases that were decided by a board with three invalidly appointed members. Many of the board decisions are up on court appeal and will have to be remanded to the NLRB for full hearings.
It's not yet clear how many cases will be affected by the invalidation of the three Obama-appointed NLRB members, Sharon Block, Richard Griffin and Terence Flynn. Estimates ranged from the low hundreds to up to 1,400 individual cases, some of which are still pending in federal appeals courts.
"We hope the NLRB will re-issue decisions in these cases quickly for the sake of the working families affected,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, the union representing the largest number of healthcare workers.
Experts say it doesn't appear likely that the NLRB now will make different decisions in cases that favored employees. But it remains to be seen if the NLRB will take a closer look at past cases that were decided in employers' favor. “What will be very interesting to see is if the board rubberstamps these or if it will dive into these issues to push its agenda,” said Michael Asensio, a labor-management attorney with Baker Hostetler in Columbus, Ohio.
In particular, hospital officials will be keenly interested in how the NLRB construes controversies involving employee speech. Virtually every hospital has policies governing what front-line providers including nurses and doctors can say and do. That's become a critical issue as systems try to achieve high patient-satisfaction scores that can guarantee better payments from insurers. But such policies can be seen as interfering with workers' rights to talk about workplace conditions and union organizing.
“It is the intersection between quality, safety and employee engagement with legitimate business and work rules,” said K. Bruce Stickler, a labor-management attorney with Drinker Biddle in Chicago who has worked as labor counsel to hospitals and the American Hospital Association. “The biggest issue from my perspective is now there is uncertainty.”
Follow Joe Carlson on Twitter: @MHJCarlson
