Employees who assign other employees to overall duties, are held
accountable for directing subordinates to undertake specific tasks, and
have the discretion to do so without close direction from management will
be recognized as "supervisors." So says the National Labor
Relations Board in a trilogy of decisions issued on September 29,
2006. Long anticipated and much discussed, the clearly
reasoned decisions deliver on the expectation that employers would be
given the guidance they need to know who is, and who is not, a
"supervisor" within the definition contained in Section 2(11) of
the National Labor Relations Act. The fact that most individuals
asserted to be "supervisors" in these cases were deemed to be
"employees," and thus protected by the National Labor Relations
Act’s anti-discrimination provisions, reveals that organized labor’s
predictions of the demise of bargaining unit eligibility for millions of
workers appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
