NLRB’s New Chief Umpire Is Calling for Some Changes : Labor: Chairman William B. Gould says he’ll work to foster cooperation between workers and management.
As an ardent baseball fan and devoted follower of the Boston Red Sox, William B. Gould IV relished his role as an arbitrator in four salary disputes between major league owners and players in 1992 and 1993.
But Gould, sworn in last week as chairman of the National Labor Relations Board after a bitter confirmation fight, says with pride that he kept his personal feelings out of the decision making and was fair in his rulings.
Now that Gould is umpiring the American workplace--the agency he heads is the nation’s chief arbiter of labor-management disputes--he promises to be just as scrupulous in keeping his personal politics out of NLRB deliberations.
Still, both Gould and the business interests who contested his nomination agree that the NLRB under its new leader could profoundly change relations between U.S. employers and employees.
Gould, 57, whose term runs until August, 1998, said he would like his tenure to be remembered for “fostering a more cooperative relationship between labor and management. Only if we move in this direction as a country will we be able to compete more effectively in the global arena.”
Gould, a longtime Stanford University law professor and the first African American to head the NLRB, said he will try to accomplish this by “bringing the board back to the center” and re-establishing the credibility of an agency that became “increasingly politicized” under the Reagan and Bush administrations.
Yet among his critics, Gould is considered a threat to promote a pro-labor agenda that will spur union-organizing efforts. They fear that when unfair-labor-practices complaints stemming from organizing drives come before the NLRB, the agency will consistently side with the unions.
Brad Cameron, a spokesman for the Labor Policy Assn., the big-business group that led the attack on Gould, said his organization’s members were frightened by the proposals in Gould’s 1993 book, “Agenda for Reform.”
In the book, Gould advocates such measures as giving workers the right to bargain collectively with their employer if a majority of employees at a work site sign union authorization cards--an innovation that would preclude the often drawn-out process of conducting union representation elections. Gould also supports proposed legislation to ban the permanent replacement of strikers.
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In a recent interview at his Stanford office during a break from packing for his move to Washington, Gould hewed to his long-stated philosophy that unions are the best vehicle for advocating employees’ interests. But Gould, has worked both for a management law firm and on the staff of the United Auto Workers union, has also been critical of organized labor.
Early in his career, for example, he derided labor for discriminating against minorities.
Furthermore, Gould said his critics should have no fear of his trying to push a personal agenda on the NLRB. As chairman, “you are circumscribed in your ability to decide things the way you’d like them to be decided,” he said, emphasizing that he would be restricted to interpreting the law as it’s written and would lack the authority to enact the reforms he has advocated in his writings.
“If I decided cases as I would like Congress to decide the issues . . . I would be violating my oath of office,” Gould said.
Many others who know Gould and his work say that although he is clearly interested in rejuvenating the union movement, he is far from the “radical” he was portrayed as in congressional hearings. In fact, Louis Melendez, associate counsel for Major League Baseball’s player relations committee, says he couldn’t detect either a pro-management or pro-player bias in Gould’s deliberations. (For the record, the box score on Gould’s baseball salary decisions were three in favor of the owners and one in favor of a player.)
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“He’s very bright, very knowledgeable about baseball and a fair person,” Melendez said. “You can’t ask for anything more than that.”
But Cameron points out that although Gould has pledged to “reduce polarization” between labor and management, he lashed out at his critics immediately after winning confirmation March 2.
Gould, normally soft-spoken, issued a news release citing his “victory over a determined campaign of cynical character assassination waged against me for these past nine months by right-wing ideologues in the Republican Party and in some elements of the business community.”
The release, “with that tone, was an incredible thing. Usually, after a fight like that, everyone is gracious,” Cameron said.
Gould declined to explain the rationale for his statement and promised to try to ease tensions between opposing factions on employment law issues once he arrives in Washington. To help weather his future crises, Gould says, he will draw inspiration from several personal heroes.
One is his late father, an electrical engineer who Gould says always maintained his “inherent goodness” despite being “subjected to the most rank, overt discrimination” in the workplace.
Amid the Boston Red Sox pictures and other sports memorabilia in his modest Stanford office, Gould has also kept a photo of his meeting with another personal hero, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela.
Gould, who has visited South Africa eight times to give labor law lectures--and who was banned from the country in the 1980s--has met with Mandela twice and knows of him mainly through working with his deputy. Gould said Mandela’s “demeanor and his manner of speech and conduct inspire me. South Africa has extreme good fortune that someone like that, without bitterness and instead interested in promoting reconciliation, is in the position he is in.”
