On April 29, 2019, the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) issued Memorandum GC 19-06, which provides guidance to the Board’s regional offices on how to handle cases involving Beck objectors and how to allocate secondary expenses related to union lobbying activity after the Board’s March 1, 2019 decision in United Nurses & Allied Professionals (Kent Hospital), 367 NLRB No. 94 (2019). In Communications Workers of America v. Beck, the Supreme Court held that a union cannot use agency fees collected from a non-member employee—that is, an employee subject to a union security clause but who chooses not to be represented by the union—on activities unrelated to collective bargaining, contract administration, or grievance adjustment if the non-member employee objects to such an expenditure (a so-called “Beck objector”). 487 U.S. 735 (1998). As we recently explained in our March 2019 post covering Kent Hospital, the Board further limited the permissible uses of agency fees by ruling that lobbying costs incurred by a union fall outside the scope of a union’s statutory duties as the exclusive bargaining representative of non-member employees.
Continue Reading No Evidence? No Problem! National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel Memorandum Eases Burden On Beck Objectors Following Board’s Decision in Kent Hospital

On March 1, 2019, the National Labor Relations Board (“Board”), in a 3-1 decision, ruled that Beck objectors cannot be required to financially support the lobbying efforts of unions because lobbying costs are not chargeable as incurred during a union’s performance of statutory duties as the objectors’ exclusive bargaining agent. United Nurses & Allied Professionals (Kent Hospital), 367 NLRB No. 94 (2019). This decision comes six years after the Board’s first ruling in this case—a ruling in which the Board found that lobbying expenses can be chargeable to Beck objectors under certain circumstances (which was later vacated by the Supreme Court’s 2014 Noel Canning decision)—and represents the Board’s most recent effort to closely scrutinize the dues charged by unions: recall, for example, the Board’s decision in Teamsters Local 75 (Schreiber Foods), 365 NLRB No. 48 (2017), in which the Board held that Teamsters Local 75 violated the National Labor Relations Act (“Act”) for failing to provide sufficient information to Beck objectors regarding how it calculated the chargeability and non-chargeability of its own dues expenditures, as well as sufficient information about how it determined the chargeability and non-chargeability of the per capita dues paid to affiliated entities.
Continue Reading I’m Not Paying for That! National Labor Relations Board Increases Rights of Beck Objectors and Further Limits the Activities Unions Can Fund Through Dues Collections