The NLRB Will Eliminate Faster Union Elections. How Much Does it Matter?

In the four years since the union election rules changed, the election time period has been two weeks shorter, and the union win rate increased by more than 3%.

In 2014, Obama’s NLRB adopted a number of rule changes that were intended to streamline how union elections were conducted. These changes followed a lengthy NLRB rule-making process which received tens of thousands of comments and went into effect in April, 2015. Perhaps the most important result was that the time period between the filing of a union petition and the election would be shorter. That’s why this rule change was opposed by employer groups as promoting what they called “ambush elections.” Their complaint was that employers had less time to “educate” workers about the drawbacks of organizing a union. In other words, they would have less time for their union busting campaigns.

Now with Trump’s NLRB, nothing good can be left alone. The board published a Request for Information (RFI) about this rule in 2017. It has recently announced a new rule that would implement more than a dozen changes to the process and would involve “extending deadlines and adding steps” that are expected to increase the election time period. I wanted to see what the impact of the 2015 rule has been and what we might lose with this change.

The Time to Election

Let’s verify that the time period is indeed shorter by looking at the median days until the election. It’s been…