The U.S. Chamber of Commerce today sent a letter to members of Congress opposing U.S. House of Representatives bill 1644, the "Re-Empowerment of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradesworkers Act," or RESPECT. (Someone must have stayed up all night working on that acronym.)
This is the perennial issue about how to classify a worker who spends part of his time as a supervisor. For example, some nurses take turns being in "charge" on their floors on overnight shifts. They may be in charge of a handful of workers on a Thursday night. Then on Friday night, someone else is in charge. Or there may be a lead carpenter dividing up tasks among several others at a job site.
The AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation, also wrote a letter. Unions say that these workers should be included in collective bargaining units and be permitted to receive overtime like other hourly workers, because their responsibilities, even as supervisors, are narrowly defined and don't include, for example, the power to hire, fire or demote. They say that companies will require workers to spend a small portion of their time as supervisors simply to remove them from union ranks.
The Chamber's position is that allowing these kinds of workers to be in unions creates a conflict because management workers would be subjected to union rules and union discipline. The provision, it says, flies in the face of 50 years of labor and will end up pushing more management workers into collective bargaining units.
The debate rises from a series of National Labor Relations Board cases on this topic known as the Kentucky River or Oakwood cases (see Inquirer stories here). Even the NLRB has not really been able to sort this out, which is why it is becoming a matter of legislation.
