In a unanimous decision reversing a ruling by an agency Administrative Law Judge (ALJ), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) concluded recently that a company did not violate federal labor law when it fired an employee for a conversation overheard in a public bathroom where the employee used disparaging language in reference to customers while discussing the handling of customer calls.
The Quicken Loans ruling, which follows on the NLRB’s important ruling earlier this year in Alstate Maintenance in which it overruled a troubling legal precedent adopted by the Board in 2011, is yet another indicator that the NLRB as currently constituted will continue to look for opportunities to rein in some of the overreaching legal precedents adopted by the Board during the Obama era.
Like the Alstate ruling, the decision in Quicken Loans zeroes in on the issue of what constitutes protected concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Indeed, further illustrating that the extent of the NLRA’s protection of concerted activity has its limits, Democratic Board Member Lauren McFerran, who dissented in the Alstate case, joined her two Republican colleagues here in agreeing that the facts simply did not support a finding of an NLRA violation.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.