Pearce Withdraws (Beltway Buzz, February 8, 2019)

The Beltway Buzz is a weekly update summarizing labor and employment news from inside the Beltway and clarifying how what's happening in Washington, D.C. could impact your business.

Pearce Withdraws. The Buzz has written extensively about the end of former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) member Mark Gaston Pearce's term in August 2018, his subsequent renomination just days letter, and the expiration of that renomination upon the adjournment of the 115th Congress. Well, it seems as though this ongoing saga may have finally reached an endpoint, as Bloomberg BNA reported earlier this week that Pearce had withdrawn his name from consideration for another term on the Board. At this time, it is not known whether the White House will nominate another candidate, though many in the business community are hopeful that the seat will remain vacant (per tradition). Pearce was instrumental in the development of most of the Board's high-profile policy changes in recent years, such as the Specialty Healthcare and Browning-Ferris Industries decisions, as well as the changes to the Board's union election procedures.

School Board. Speaking of the NLRB, this week the Board announced that it is soliciting briefs on "whether the Board should exercise its discretion to decline jurisdiction over charter schools" and overrule (or modify) two 2016 Board decisions that held that the Board has jurisdiction over such schools. While this case is obviously limited to a particular industry, it perhaps speaks to a larger effort of the current Board to pull back on what some Board-watchers had felt was an overextension in recent years of the Board's jurisdiction over certain industries (such as charter schools) and workers (such as graduate students and supervisors). Briefs must be submitted by March 6, 2019.

Railway Labor Act Decertification Changes Proposed. On January 31, 2019, the National Mediation Board (NMB) proposed changes to its procedures for decertifying bargaining representatives. While decertification of bargaining representatives is permitted under the Railway Labor Act, current regulations require employees to first nominate a "straw man" representative and then vote for "no union" in the resulting election. NMB's proposal eliminates this indirect "straw man" requirement "to simplify the decertification...

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