John Raudabaugh, a Former Member of the NLRB, Comments on Oakwood

Over at the HR Policy Association's NLRB Watch webpage, John N. Raudabaugh summarizes the Board's Oakwood decision and makes the following comment:

Despite organized labor’s extreme rhetoric calling the Oakwood Healthcare decision “shameless”, “cheap”, a “semantic trick”, and redefining NLRB to “National League of Republican Businessmen”, few individuals will be “deprived” of their rights. First, unlike healthcare, most industry sectors do not employ significant numbers of professionally trained, scientific, or advanced degreed individuals who, additionally, might also qualify for the “supervisory” exclusion. Second, unless unions actually engage in organizing, any mass “deprivation of rights” is theoretical. Targeting the NLRB when it was responding to two rebukes from the Supreme Court to “get it right” is wrong-headed. It is the 1947 amendments to the 1935 Act that is the basis for the NLRB’s ruling on who is or who is not a “supervisor.” Of course, therein lies organized labor’s objective – political rescue. This issue surely will be at the top of their legislative agenda in the new Congress.

Raudabaugh, a Republican, served as a Member of the NLRB from 1990 to 1993.