Union Elections Already on Fast Track – No Need for ‘Ambush’

February 6, 2012
Shopfloor
Joe Trauger

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been making a case that representation elections need to be put on a faster track. When the Board originally published their “ambush elections” proposed rule, their notion of an ideal timeframe between when a petition for certification and the actual election worked out to 10-14 days. Of course, employers were concerned about such a compressed schedule for a number of practical reasons, but it also violates a fundamental sense of fairness most Americans hold with regard to elections.

While the final rule did not truncate the election time period as much as the proposed rule, it does shorten it to somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-24 days according to some experts. Employers remain concerned about the timing of these elections, because they often are not aware an organizing campaign is going on until they receive notice the petition has been filed. At that point, the employer has some tough choices to make and different rules to follow about how and what they can communicate to their employees. In short, they have serious ground to cover in order to catch up – meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

As we anxiously await the NLRB General Counsel’s Summary of Operations report for fiscal year 2011 – which according to my research results has not been issued later than February 4th in the last ten years – I thought it would be good to go over some historical data about representation elections and paint a picture to show what’s really going on and why employers believe the Board’s ambush elections rule is a solution in search of a problem.

Over the ten-year period from 2001-2010, an average of 2,356 elections were petitioned for each year. Of that number, 89.9 percent of the petitions were agreed to by both parties. The median time it took from the time the petition was filed to the date of the election was 38.9 days. Finally, 93.8 percent were completed within 56 days – though in full disclosure I could not find data for 2001, so this number is really a nine-year average, but the yearly percentages for an election to be completed in 56 days ranged from a low of 91 percent in 2002 to a high of 95.5 percent in 2009. A chart is included below to illustrate these numbers.

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