The new Republican majority in the Senate is turning up the pressure on the National Labor Relations Board, with a series of hearings and legislative attacks against policies that make it easier for workers to unionize, reports The Hill.

The hearings will put a spotlight on an agency increasingly held in disdain by Republicans, while also offering a platform for the GOP to cozy up to the business groups that have assailed the labor board as blatantly pro-union. Atop the GOP’s agenda is an effort to beat back regulations that would speed up the process by which employees vote to form a union, according to the report in The Hill.

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The United Steelworkers union said Feb. 7 the strike by U.S. refinery workers is expanding to two more plants early on Sunday due to unfair labor practices by oil companies, reports Reuters.

Walk-outs at BP Plc’s Whiting, Indiana, refinery and the company’s joint-venture refinery with Husky Energy in Toledo, Ohio, shortly after 12 a.m. local time on Sunday would bring the number of plants with striking hourly workers to 11, including nine refineries accounting for 13 percent of U.S. refining capacity.

BP said on Friday it had received notice of the walk-outs at the two refineries, but the Steelworkers had said little about them until Saturday, the Reuters report added.

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The United Steelworkers Union called for its refinery workers to stage their largest walkout in more 30 years Sunday, saying its negotiations with Shell Oil Co. broke down less than two weeks after they began, the Associated Press reports.

The union asked about 3,800 workers at nine refineries mostly in Texas and California to strike shortly after their previous contract expired after midnight.

The AP reports that the call for a strike happened after United Steelworkers, or USW, rejected Shell’s fourth contract offer. The union said Shell refused to provide a counter offer and that the company’s representatives had left the bargaining table.

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Courts weighing whether union retirees have vested lifetime health-care benefits should apply ordinary contract principles, rather than special inferences or presumptions, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, Bloomberg BNA reports.

The unanimous Jan. 26 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas is largely a win for employers, which may now have more freedom to alter, reduce or eliminate the health-care benefits they provide to retired union workers.

Bloomberg BNA says the court invalidated what has become known as the Yard-Man inference, a judicial inference applied by the retiree-friendly U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit to find that retiree health-care benefits are vested for life in the absence of specific language to the contrary in a plan document or collective bargaining agreement.

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The U.S. Supreme Court appears likely to review whether the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission must seek conciliation with employers before suing them for violating federal law, reports Business Insurance.

The high court heard oral arguments last week in a case in which a three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled unanimously in 2013 that employers cannot use the EEOC’s failure to seek conciliation as a defense, the site reports.

The EEOC had alleged in EEOC v. Mach Mining L.L.C. that the company discriminated against women in its hiring practices.

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The National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel’s Office has again signaled its commitment to expanding the scope of the current test for joint employment, reports Orrick’s Employment Law and Litigation Blog.

In a move that could have implications for a broad array of franchise relationships, on Dec. 19, 2014, the General Counsel of the NLRB announced that it has issued complaints against both McDonald’s franchisees and McDonald’s USA, the franchisor, as a joint employer.

The decision to name McDonald’s as a respondent is consistent with the General Counsel’s recent advocacy that the current joint employment standard is too narrow, the blog reports.

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The National Labor Relations Board is getting ready to issue an onslaught of law-changing decisions as we head into the holiday season, predicts The National Law Review.

This onslaught of change likely will be hastened by the departure of Board Member Nancy Schiffer, whose term is set to expire Dec. 16.  So, keep an eye out as of December 18 when the decisions are likely to be posted on the NLRB’s website, The Review suggests.

In the article, the Review says:

The NLRB Division of Advice has answered a question that has been the subject of many charges since the Board’s decision in Alan Ritchey, Inc., 359 NLRB No. 40 (December 14, 2012), where it held that in cases where a union has recently secured representational rights, the employer has a duty to bargain over discretionary aspects of discipline before imposition until an initial contract is reached. The Board’s decision in Alan Ritchey was invalidated by the Supreme Court earlier this year, yet the agency still applies its rationale as if nothing happened to the underlying case.

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The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday that employers could not prohibit employees from using their company’s email to communicate and engage in union organizing on their own time, The New York Times reports.

The 3-to-2 ruling overturned a decision made in 2007, when Republicans held a majority on the board, that had forbidden such use of email.

The current majority, noting how technology has transformed daily habits, called that ruling “clearly incorrect,” according to The Times report. “The workplace is ‘uniquely appropriate’ and ‘the natural gathering place’ for such communications,” the board wrote, “and the use of email as a common form of workplace communication has expanded dramatically in recent years.”

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An administrative law hearing that could determine whether more than 3,000 workers at the nation’s biggest peach farm are unionized got heated when a lawyer for Gerawan Farming accused the chief prosecutor in the case of playing “hide and seek” with evidence and witnesses

As reported by CNBC, California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) General Counsel Sylvia Torres-Guillen, who is responsible for investigating and prosecuting the case, has alleged that Gerawan Farming carried out unfair labor practices, engaged in bad-faith bargaining, and tainted workers.

“This case from the beginning has been hide and seek by the general counsel,” said Ronald Barsamian, an attorney for Gerawan. “We’re still waiting for the UFW to put on its case—let alone the ALRB. If it’s not hide and seek, it’s just not preparing adequately for this case.”

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The National Basketball Association players association has hired Gary Kohlman as its new general counsel, according to a report in The New York Times.

Kohlman was lead trial lawyer at the Washington firm Bredhoff & Kaiser, where he represented the Service Employees International Union and the United Steelworkers.

In February, he argued in front of the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of Northwestern’s scholarship football players, who sought the right to form a union, The Times reported. The N.L.R.B.’s regional director ruled in favor of the players. Kohlman also worked with the Major League Baseball players union after the 1994 strike.

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