The Legacy of “Specialty Healthcare”
This post was coauthored by Inna Shelley.
The National Labor Relations Board decision in the Specialty Healthcare case has continued paving the way for the certification of increasingly fragmented micro bargaining units. On May 4th, the director of NLRB Region 2 approved a collective bargaining unit of full-time and part-time salespersons in the women’s shoe departments on the 2nd (Designer Shoes) and 5th (Contemporary Shoes) floors of a Bergdorf Goodman department store. The approved unit would likely consist of less than 12% of the store’s sales associates and an even lesser percentage of the store’s non-supervisory workers. The full text of this Neiman Marcus Group decision is available here.
Neiman Marcus Group continues the recent Board trend of allowing fragmented micro-units. Such units allow unions to gain a foothold by organizing only an increasingly small subset of employees. Unions no longer have to expend resources to organize the bulk of an employer’s workforce as long as they can identify any group of employees who share an alleged “community of interest” under the traditional criteria. This analysis is often quite subjective and considers whether employees (1) are organized into separate departments (2) have distinct skills and training (3) have distinct job functions or whether there is job overlap (4) are functionally integrated with other employees (5) have frequent contact with other employees (6) interchange with other employees, and (7) have distinct terms and conditions of employment.
Under Specialty Healthcare, if a unit is found appropriate under the above standard, it will be recognized even though a larger unit would be even more appropriate. To successfully challenge a smaller unit, the employer must demonstrate that employees in a petitioned-for, smaller unit share an “overwhelming community of interest” with other employees in a larger unit.
In approving a unit of women’s shoe sales associates on two store floors, Neiman Marcus Group emphasized that salespersons in the shoe departments were paid on a different wage scale than salespersons in other departments. It also distinguished the sale of shoes from that of other merchandise, claiming that shoe salespersons needed different skills and training and that many of them had significant prior experience selling shoes before their hire. Shoe salespersons also made minimal sales of other merchandise and transfers of salespersons from other departments to shoes were uncommon.
It did not matter that sales employees across all departments were subject to the same personnel policies, including health benefits, vacation and holiday policies, evaluations, probation, or use of a common cafeteria. Interestingly, the regional director concluded that salespersons of men’s shoes should not be in the unit because men’s shoes were sold in the men’s section of the department store located across the street and there was allegedly little association between the men’s and women’s shoe salespersons despite access to a common cafeteria.
The decision also analyzed Specialty Healthcare’s Footnote 29, which stated that Specialty Healthcare was not meant to disturb special industry presumptions and occupational rules. There is, of course, a longstanding presumption in the retail industry that the appropriate unit is store-wide. While recognizing that industry presumptions must still be followed after Specialty Healthcare, the regional director rejected the retail industry presumption. Instead, the director relied upon isolated retail cases, including those with stipulated units and those finding that appropriate units consisted of all salespersons, as opposed to only those who sell particular merchandise. Thus, as long as an exception allowing a smaller unit can be identified in a particular industry, even via voluntary approval, employers may not be able to successfully rely on long-established industry practice to challenge a proposed fragmented unit.
Neiman Marcus Group also affirms that in the post Specialty Healthcare world, it is now increasingly difficult for employers to challenge a proposed micro-unit by claiming that there is an “overwhelming community of interest” with a larger employee group. Such an “overwhelming community of interest” exists only where almost every community of interest factor overlaps almost completely. Any perceived difference in job functions or other terms or conditions of employment may justify a bargaining unit of a small employee group.
As a result, employers may find themselves under the obligation to engage in collective bargaining with a multitude of splintered employee groups, in spite of vastly overlapping interests that do not quite rise to “overwhelming” by the Board’s assessment. Cases like Neiman Marcus Group demonstrate that when the Board said in Specialty Healthcare that its decision did not presage any major changes, it wasn’t quite telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.