Worker’s Firing for Citing Safety Faults Upheld
A company can legally fire an individual under the nation’s labor relations laws for reporting violations of federal safety statutes to the government, the National Labor Relations Board said.
In an opinion released Sunday, the NLRB upheld its 1984 decision dismissing a complaint by a non-union Michigan truck driver who contended that he was fired illegally under the Taft-Hartley Act for arranging an inspection of his rig after it was involved in an accident because of malfunctioning brakes.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last year ordered the NLRB to reconsider the case. In a 2-1 decision, the court said the agency erred in stating that the Taft-Hartley law restricts “concerted activity” to only those actions engaged in with or on behalf of other employees.
‘Reasonable Construction’
In its new ruling Sunday that NLRB officials said will likely reach the Supreme Court eventually, the board agreed that its narrow definition of concerted activity is not mandated by the 1947 law.
But it said its definition is a discretionary “reasonable construction” because the law is aimed at protecting collective actions by workers rather than activities “solely by and on behalf of” an individual employee.
The board said the truck driver, Kenneth P. Prill, was not protected from being fired by Meyers Industries Inc. of Tecumseh, Mich., because he took the action on his own and did not try to enlist the support of co-workers.
“Although we may be outraged by a respondent who may have imperiled public safety, we are not empowered to correct all immorality or illegality arising under all federal and state statutes,” the NLRB said.
Another Act Cited
Instead, the board said, workers in Prill’s position should rely on the Surface Transportation Assistance Act of 1982, which prohibits discharges or discipline for reporting complaints about motor vehicle safety.
The board, however, acknowledged that the 1982 law, which provides for complaint avenues in the Labor Department, was not enacted until three years after Prill’s discharge and, therefore, is not available to him in this case.
Before he was fired, Prill had lodged several complaints with supervisors about the poor condition of the steering and brakes on the truck, which was used for delivering boats from Meyers’ plant at Tecumseh to dealers around the country.
The ruling effectively reverses a policy adopted by the NLRB in 1975 when it ordered the reinstatement of a California worker who was fired for reporting safety violations at his plant to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
