• “Labor law in America has reached the absurd point where the NLRB is taking the position that a company can’t tell its employees to have a positive attitude” [Ira Stoll on Trader Joe’s controversy, following on T-Mobile case last April, earlier on predecessor 2014 decision in Hills and Dales General Hospital]
• Judge Janice Rogers Brown, writing for D.C. Circuit, rips NLRB for “abusive tactics and extremism.” orders it to pay employer’s attorney fees [Jon Hyman, David Leishman and Seth Borden, McGuire Woods Labor Relations Today (citing Board’s “nonacquiescence” policy), opinion in Heartland Plymouth Court MI, LLC v. NLRB]
• Quoting John Ross’s Short Circuit: Illinois telephone company “may not have violated the rights of striking worker (who allegedly followed a non-striker onto the highway, cut him off, slowed down, and did not allow him to pass) by firing her, says the D.C. Circuit. Concurring in her own opinion, Judge Millett reprimands the NLRB for long countenancing strikers’ sexually and racially demeaning behavior.” More on Millett’s concurrence in Consolidated Communications v. NLRB: Jon Hyman, and more on the case itself from the U.S. Chamber;
• Also quoting Short Circuit: “After discussions with NLRB, Norwood, Mass. car dealership revises employee handbook. NLRB: The new dress code, which prohibits some employees from wearing ‘pins, insignias, or other message clothing,’ still restricts labor rights. First Circuit: Just so. Dissent: Pity employers who want their employees to look nice. “[T]he Board and the courts have lured businesses into a legal bog.'”
• Congress hasn’t passed ENDA. Will courts approve EEOC’s scheme of cobbling it together virtually from other legal materials? [ABA Journal, Will Baude and more, Eugene Volokh on Seventh Circuit argument]
• California agricultural-labor law creates a right to trespass for union organizers. Help, Ninth Circuit! [Ilya Shapiro and Frank Garrison]

Filed under: hostile environment, labor unions, National Labor Relations Board, sexual orientation