What’s more offensive — and, for that matter, illegal? An employee calling a coworker a “gutter b****” and a “queen of the slums”? Or a CEO saying that bringing in a labor union will make the workplace “much slower” and “more bureaucratic”?
The answer is clearly the employee who racially and sexually demeaned his coworker. Yet in President Joe Biden’s administration, the CEO is the one getting punished.
On May 1, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated federal labor law when he said that unionization comes with downsides.
In January, the same NLRB forced Amazon to rehire a worker who insulted his colleague on the grounds that federal labor law protected him.
Rarely will you see such a double standard — and rarely is the reason so obvious.
The current NLRB, stacked with Biden’s appointees, will do almost anything to prop up labor unions. Under Chairwoman Lauren McFerran, the board has followed the example of the president, who has declared himself the most “pro-union president in history.”
The NLRB’s treatment of Amazon shows how one-sided this union favoritism really is.
The episodes quoted above happened in the context of the union campaign to organize Amazon. The company is one of Big Labor’s biggest targets, both because of its prominence in the economy and its large number of employees. Unions have been trying to organize Amazon for the better part of a decade, and their record is mostly one of failure.
Enter the employee who cursed out his colleague. After his tirade, which happened in 2020, Amazon fired him. The reason was simple: no worker should be subjected to such offensive insults, and in fact, federal law protects workers from harassment in the workplace. However, the NLRB argued that since the worker made his comments during a unionization campaign, he was protected under the National Labor Relations Act.
In other words, the NLRB said that practically no rhetoric is beyond the pale when unions are involved. If a worker supports a union — or is even in a heated dispute with management — he can say anything he wants, no matter how nasty or repulsive, and the company is powerless to intervene.
According to the NLRB, if a company such as Amazon fires that worker, they have to rehire him — and even give him back pay. That’s because the NLRB now calls such offensive comments “protected speech.”
But what about the free speech rights of CEOs? Federal labor law explicitly states that when employers express any argument, view, or opinion about unionization, it is protected speech, so long as it doesn’t include a threat of reprisal or promise of benefits to workers. That makes sense: employers have the right to tell workers about the downsides of joining a union, just as unions have the right to tell workers the opposite.
That’s exactly what Jassy did: give his opinion that unionization hurts workers — an opinion backed up by decades of experience. But, according to the NLRB, companies and their leaders now can’t say a negative word about unionization, even to third parties. That makes the NLRB’s recent ruling even more extreme. When Jassy talked about the downsides of unionization, he wasn’t talking to workers, nor was he addressing the company’s managers or board. He was simply talking to reporters.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA
By punishing Amazon’s CEO, the NLRB may as well be saying that companies and their managers no longer have the right to speak freely — that they should stay silent, period. At the same time, the NLRB has said that pro-union workers can spew disgusting epithets in the workplace with abandon — and without fear of being punished for obvious hate speech.
Lauren McFerran’s labor board is putting union demands ahead of constitutional rights, respectful workplaces, and common sense. That’s what Biden wants, but the next president should clean house at the NLRB, starting at the top.
Matthew Mimnaugh is a fellow at the Institute for the American Worker and former chief counsel at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
