A December 10, 2015 WLF Legal Pulse post, Rebuffed Twice in Texas, the NLRB Takes its Crusade Against Arbitration to California, highlighted a pattern of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions holding that binding class-action arbitration agreements violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), even though the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has twice overruled such a decision.
It seems as though the NLRB’s determination to march forward has not wavered. Just two weeks ago, in In re: Samsung Electronics America, Inc., the NLRB upheld a decision by an administrative law judge that Samsung violated the NLRA by requiring its employees to waive their rights to pursue collective claims and then attempting to enforce that agreement.
It is clear that the NLRB does not respect federal courts’ differing legal opinion as to the interpretation of the NLRA. Unfortunately, employers will now need to invest energy and resources to appeal individual NLRB decisions until the Board changes its current aggressive anti-arbitration stance.