Collective Bargaining. Verizon New York, Inc (VNY), provides telecommunications services. VNY and the Communications Workers of America (CWA) are parties to collective bargaining agreements covering installation and maintenance employees. At one time,

Question

VNY supported annual blood drives. VNY, CWA, and charitable organizations jointly set dates, arranged appointments, and adjusted work schedules for the drives. For each drive, about a thousand employees, including managers, spent up to four hours traveling to a donor site, giving blood, recovering, and returning to their jobs. Employees received full pay for the time. In 2001, VNY told CWA that it would no longer allow employees to participate "on Company time," claiming that it experienced problems meeting customer requests for service during the drives. CWA filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), asking that VNY be ordered to bargain over the decision. Did VNY commit an unfair labor practice? Should the NLRB grant CWA's request? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Collective bargaining
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found that Verizon New York, Inc. (VNY) had committed an unfair labor practice by failing to give the Communications Workers of America (CWA) an opportunity to bargain over the elimination of blood drives during paid work-time. VNY appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which affirmed the NLRB's ruling. The court acknowledged that "[a] company's shutting down part of its business to cut economic losses obviously affects its employees," but this does not make the shutdown a mandatory subject of bargaining. "To fall within that category the matter must be plainly germane to the working environment and not among those managerial decisions, which lie at the core of entrepreneurial control." The court reasoned that VNY "permitted employees to receive wages for time not worked—up to four hours per blood drive twice a year—and to have these non-working hours counted as worktime. On the days of the blood drives, donor-employees thus received eight hours of pay for four hours of work. The amount of pay received for the number of hours worked is surely germane to an individual's employment."