Weingarten Rights

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a decision from the case NLRB vs. J. Weingarten (1975) that stated employees had a right to union representation during investigation interviews between the company and union employee, or Weingarten Rights (Wikipedia). The three rules that apply during such an interview are:

1) The suspected employee needs to make a clear request for representation by a union member before or during the interview and employee cannot be punished for making this request.
2) The company has 3 options once the request is made. The company can grant the request and delay questions until the representative arrives and speaks to the employee privately, can deny the request and end the interview at that time or give the employee the choice to continue the interview without representation.
3) The company is in violation of fair labor practices if he or she denies the request for representation and continues to ask questions and the employee has the right to refuse to answer and cannot be disciplined (Wikipedia).

                                                           

If a supervisor suspected an employee of violating a company rule, such as stealing, the supervisor is required to allow a union representative to attend the meeting if the employee requests it. In my experience, working at a company with a bargaining unit, I usually call the union representative to inform him of the issue and set-up a meeting for later that day so he has time to meet with the employee and we all discuss the issue together. By including the union at the beginning, the company puts forth an effort to greatly reduce any misunderstandings, which has nearly eliminated all grievances for us in the past few years.


Article cited: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weingarten_Rights
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