Corporate Campaigns
In recent years, unions have utilized non-traditional strategies in pressuring employers to agree to their organizing and collective bargaining demands. Called corporate campaigns, these employ tactics involving the media, government agencies, legislative bodies, shareholder groups and others to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the target corporations.
Debarment of Federal Contractors
Under existing Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), a federal contractor must have a "satisfactory record of integrity and business ethics." This protects the government and taxpayers by ensuring that contractors have the integrity to fulfill their contractual promises and obligations. Organized labor and other interest groups seeking to apply pressure to large companies seek to add additional criteria that would preclude government contracts to companies accused of violating employment, environmental and other laws. This would add an effective tool to “corporate campaigns” conducted by those groups, which applies pressure through litigation and complaints filed with government regulators.
Employee Free Choice Act
Under the pretext of protecting “employee free choice,” Congress is considering the most significant change to the nation’s labor laws since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) became law. Contrary to its proclaimed goals, the Employee Free Choice Act would eliminate employee choice over union representation and substitute government dictation of wages and benefits for voluntary collective bargaining in newly unionized workplaces.
Executive Orders
Presidents of both political parties often seek to achieve certain policy goals by attaching certain conditions to government contracts. These can be achieved without legislation through the issuance of an executive order, implemented by regulations by the Department of Labor or other executive branch agencies.
Global Labor & Employment Relations
The global operation of most major corporations poses significant challenges to HR as the company seeks to ensure that those operations share a common corporate culture and values throughout the globe and that the legal requirements of various countries are complied with while maintaining the company's corporate identity, culture and reputation. Since 2007, the Association has been affiliated with our EU counterpart, the Brussels European Employee Relations Group (BEERG), in helping our member companies understand global employee relations issues as well as labor law and practice issues arising in their own operations and in their global supply chains.
National Labor Relations Board
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is the federal agency responsible for conducting union representation elections and adjudicating alleged violations of the labor laws (“unfair labor practices”) by employers and unions.