Federal Court Orders Adams and Associates to Hire Union Official

Acting on the request of the National Labor Relations Board’s San Francisco office, a federal court in Sacramento on February 10, 2015 ordered Adams and Associates, a Sacramento-based Job Corps contractor, to offer employment to an employee, who had been employed by Adams’s predecessor employer and was president of the local union.  Under the NLRB law, it is unlawful for a successor employer to refuse to hire the predecessor’s employees in order to avoid an obligation to bargain with the incumbent union.  Granting the interim relief sought by the NLRB, District Judge Kimberly Mueller ruled that there was cause to believe that Adams had refused to extend the local union president employment due to anti-union motivations and that requiring Adams to hire the local union president was necessary to prevent irreparable harm to the collective-bargaining process at Adams’s Sacramento facility. The Judge therefore ordered Adams to immediately offer the employee her former position and to permit her access to the facility for the purpose of representing Union members in grievance proceedings and other union-related matters, pending the final disposition of the underlying case before the NLRB.
The NLRB’s August 28, 2014 complaint alleges that Adams discriminatorily refused to hire the President of the Sacramento Job Corps Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers Local 4986 (the Union). It also alleges that Adams failed to afford the Union notice and opportunity to bargain before disciplining union-represented employees during first-contract bargaining and changed union-represented employees’ terms and conditions of employment without bargaining.  On November 12, 2014, the NLRB further alleged that Adams unlawfully refused to grant the local union president access to the facility for the purpose of collective bargaining.  Although the administrative complaint also alleges that a separate company, McConnell, Jones, Lanier and Murphy, is a joint employer with Adams, the NLRB did not name MJLM as a defendant in the district court case.
A full evidentiary hearing was held before an NLRB administrative law judge in late January and early February.  A decision is expected in the next several months.