The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced yesterday (3/19/20) that they will be suspending all representation elections, including mail-in ballots, until April 3, 2020. This action has been taken to protect the health and safety of its employees and anyone else involved in the elections process during the current COVID-19 pandemic, and because several regional offices have been closed, jeopardizing the effectiveness of the elections.

The Board will continue monitoring the situation to determine if additional extensions will be needed.

Read more about the decision here.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has unveiled a $150m anti-Trump campaign in an effort to hinder President Trump’s reelection. The Union, which has nearly 2m members, is aiming the campaign at 6 million voters who don’t usually vote in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The campaign, aimed at people of color, will include direct contact and online advertising.

Read more about it here.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued its final rule for Joint-Employer relations on February 26, 2020. The rule states that “a business must possess and exercise substantial direct and immediate control over one or more essential terms and conditions of employment of another employer’s employees.” It also further defines “substantial direct and immediate control” and clarifies that control on a sporadic or isolated basis would not qualify.

Read the full NLRB rule here.

Immediately prior to the vote on the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka threatened lawmakers to vote yes on the PRO Act, or “Those who would oppose, delay or derail this legislation” would lose support from Big Labor, further stating “do not ask the labor movement . . . for a dollar or door knock.”

Read more about the threat and PRO Act here.

After years of requests for better labor union oversight, the Labor Department’s union watchdog office has finally added a pair of aides with extensive experience advocating against organized labor. One of those new aides is none other than Rusty Brown, formerly of RWP Labor, who started as a union-avoidance consultant on January 6.

Bloomberg Law said of Rusty, “Brown was involved in a massive campaign to decertify a union representing 27,000 home care workers in Minnesota. He also pushed the department last year to investigate a prominent Texas worker center that has been a vocal critic of working conditions on construction projects.”

The other aide, Trey Kovacs, who began as a special assistant on January 21, is formerly a labor policy analyst at the free market think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Read more about the agency’s strides forward here.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions declined in 2019 by 0.2% from 2018 to 10.3%. In comparison, unions once stood at 20.1% in 1983, the first year for which data was made available.

Public-sector worker union rates (33.6%) eclipsed private-sector workers (6.2%) by five times, marking a historical low for private-sector unions.

Read the full Department of Labor News Release here.