Policy Oscillation at the Labor Board: A Plea for Rulemaking
Files
Description
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has made the labor law professor's job a nightmare. A labor law professor's dream, like that of any other serious academic, is to deal with a relatively inert body of law, to be able to read the decisions and statutes once—and only once—and then work up a fairly decent set of notes which can be used year after year, leaving time for the more worthwhile pursuits of life. This federal agency simply won't let us be. These days the BNA labor service treats us to a reversal a week by the NLRB, sometimes coupled with notice that the Board has asked a court of appeals to remand a case to it for reconsideration. How is my tennis game to improve under these circumstances? With a conservative bloc firmly in place, and the dramatic number of reversals that have come down in the little over three years since Ronald Reagan took office, it is not surprising that Board reversals, or what I call policy oscillation, have sparked public concern (at least in some quarters), or that the 37th National Conference on Labor has decided to host a panel on this topic. Numerically, policy reversals account for only a modest portion of the Board's decisional output. Their significance lies not in the numbers but in the perception of litigants and the labor relations community that the agency's rules are in perpetual flux, that litigiousness may ultimately be rewarded with a change in the law.
Source Publication
Proceedings of New York University 37th Annual National Conference on Labor
Source Editors/Authors
Richard Adelman
Publication Date
1984
Recommended Citation
Estreicher, Samuel, "Policy Oscillation at the Labor Board: A Plea for Rulemaking" (1984). Faculty Chapters. 480.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/480
