Monday, December 22, 2014

NLRB Charges McDonald's With Employee Rights Violations

By: Rmuse
Sunday, December, 21st, 2014, 2:49 pm   
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Over the past few years, a word that has become a favorite of conservatives is overreaching that in their mind is an African American President doing the job he was elected to do. The word is also a conservative favorite to describe any federal agency doing the job it was created for such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), or more recently the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Republicans want those agencies eliminated from existence because they protect the people; instead of corporate profits which is just one reason Republicans hate regulatory agencies. As an aside, Republicans never claim they overreach by imposing religion on the people, but one cannot mention that without violating the mortal sin of criticizing the religious right.
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On Friday, the NLRB was accused of extreme overreach because it ruled that fast-food giant McDonald's violated the rights of its employees who violated a Republican corporate mortal sin; seeking better pay and working conditions. The NRLB's job is resolving employee-management disputes in the private sector, but as is usually the case, McDonald's and Republicans accused the federal agency of politically-based overreach for investigating valid worker complaints that McDonald's violated labor laws.
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After receiving hundreds of complaints from McDonald's employees, the NLRB launched an investigation and found that McDonald's, through its franchise relationship, resources, and technology, "engages in sufficient control over its franchisees' operations, beyond protection of the brand, to make it a putative joint employer with franchisees sharing liability for violations" of labor law the agency enforces. The employee complaints were from around the nation and not, as McDonald's asserts, from individual businesses and proved the NRLB's point by defending the corporate position on employee relations.
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McDonald's corporate office claimed it was well within its corporate right to "defend itself" from an attack on its business by employees around the nation who had the temerity to seek better wages and working conditions. The company justified the corporate practice of "summary firings, cutting hours, threats, surveillance, and discriminatory discipline" against workers to teach them a lesson that exercising their legal right to ask for a wage increase would not go unpunished. The company also said it had no control over individual franchises in major and small cities nationwide engaging in concerted "coercive conduct" against employees exercising their protected and legal activity.
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