Worker "Disloyalty" Leads to Discharge; Employer Disloyalty Is Good for Business

SO GOES THE TWISTED LOGIC OF THE RICH BLOODSUCKING ASSCLOWNS!

(Photo: via Shutterstock )The National Labor Relations Act protects the right of employees to join together to change working conditions. The law, as written by Congress, has no exception to this protection. But that doesn't mean the courts couldn't create exceptions big enough to drive a fleet of trucks through. 

In fact, the blanket protection Congress put into the NLRA has been eaten full of holes by judicial moths. It's hard to decide which of the judicial amendments creates the most outrageous exception to the law's protection, but making employee disloyalty into a cardinal sin certainly deserves an award for chutzpah and judicial overreach. 

The basic problem is that the word is so vague, it is easy to manipulate. If asked what employee "disloyalty" is, many people might say "stealing employer property." Take organizing a union, for example, or employees' complaints about working conditions. The NLRA actually says that organizing unions and participating in concerted activity to change working conditions are protected. But these are also behaviors that judges have put into the category of disloyalty in some cases.

According to the Supreme Court in the 1953 case of NLRB v. Local 1229, IBEW (Jefferson Standard), disloyal employees lose the protections of the National Labor Relations Act, even though the employees' actions are precisely what Congress intended to protect. As time has passed, the category called disloyal actions has expanded, making it ever easier for employers to deprive workers of their rights under the law.

The local 1229 case that created the disloyalty "amendment" involved employees in a labor dispute with their employer, a broadcasting company, in the early years of television. The employees picketed their employer in their off-duty time to pressure the employer to agree to the employees' collective bargaining proposal. The employees also distributed a handbill attacking the quality of the employer's TV broadcasts. It was this handbill that the court concluded was so disloyal that it removed the protections of the NLRA. The judges said that the handbill's statements were an improper way to pressure their employer to settle the dispute. As a result, the court said, discharging the employees for distributing this flier was legal.

The disloyalty exception has proved to be slippery and unpredictable in application. In one case, a Coors employee who was fired for coming to work with a "Boycott Coors" bumper sticker on his car was reinstated, but the discharge of another employee who was fired for disloyalty because he participated in a "Boycott Hormel" parade was upheld as lawful. The minute difference between these cases makes it hard for employees to determine what forms of protest are protected, particularly because the boycott is a traditional labor tactic that Congress certainly intended to protect in passing the NLRA.

When a concept like disloyalty is so vague and undefined, it is easy for unconscious bias to influence decisions. If a person's experience makes it easier to see the employer's position than that of the workers, the decision will give more weight to the employer's interest, while appearing to the decision-maker to be unbiased. Many judges have little or no experience as workers, making it easier for them to see and adopt the employer's perspective...

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