STATEMENT: AFSA President Jill S. Levy Calls NLRB Ruling on the Kentucky River Cases...

WASHINGTON -- The American Federation of School Administrators (AFSA), AFL-CIO today released the following statement in response to the recent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) 3-2 ruling in the Oakwood Healthcare, Inc. case that creates a new definition of a supervisor.

"The ruling

"By expanding the definition of a supervisor to include nurses who spend as little as 10-15 percent of their time overseeing lesser-skilled workers, and therefore are no longer eligible to join a union, makes no logical sense. Workers in these positions have enjoyed union rights for a half-century.

"Why change their employment status now? Their job descriptions haven't changed - their duties haven't changed.

"What has changed is the composition of the NLRB. It is dominated by right-wing, pro-business, anti-union members. The reason they are redefining what it means to be a managerial employee is to advance their political agenda - the elimination of unions.

"As an organization that represents supervisory employees, we find it particularly offensive that the NLRB would use redefining a supervisory employee as a way to take away a worker's right to join a union and bargain collectively over the terms and conditions of employment.

"NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh wrote in the dissenting opinion they fear this decision 'threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law - workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.' We agree.

"Mid-level supervisory employees, like the nurses in question, are in the most vulnerable position in the workplace. They are subject to pressures from the management above, and from the workforce they supervise. Stripping them from their collective bargaining rights to job security and due process is unconscionable.

"First the Bush-controlled NLRB takes away the union rights of university graduate assistants, workers with disabilities, and temporary workers. Today it's nurses. Who is next on their hit list?

"We have been fighting this kind of union-busting in the public sector, and we will continue to fight it in the private sector.

"Someone needs to remind the NLRB that they are supposed to be protecting workers' rights, not eliminating them. Taking away the basic, human right to join a union is un-American and anti-Democratic."