Employee Rights During a Grievance Meeting

Sunny

In a union company, we suspended pending discharge for fighting. The employee showed up at his discharge hearing with a tape recorder and refused to stay at the meeting unless he could tape record it. We refused and ended the meeting. Does he have this right?

Don D

NO!

Crout

ABSOLUTELY NOT! The EE's Weingarten rights do not extend to audio taping. You did the right thing in cancelling the meeting, but why didn't the EE have a Union rep with him/her in the first place?

Sunny

He had a rep with him (there were 4 union people plus the employee). However, he wanted an attorney as well - and if no attorney he wanted to tape the meeting for his attorney.

Don D

Sounds like to me the ee thought it was HIS meeting, rather than the company's meeting. Unless your contract specifically details the ee's right to form some sort of grievance committee, he didn't have a right to have FOUR union people there either. The rights extended to an employee by the NLRA allow him to have another employee of his choosing present and typically it's a union rep, but certainly not 2 or 3 or 4, nor a recorder, nor an attorney, nor his wife, nor his pastor. It's the company's meeting, not the union's and not the employee's.

Sunny

He DID (mistakenly) think it was his meeting. The employees present were the union president and the grievance committee - this is standard practice for our grievance resolution meetings.

Don D

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 06-20-02 AT 12:53PM (CST)[/font][p]I thought it was a discharge hearing, not a grievance hearing. I thought you had called him in to discharge him following his suspension for fighting. In either event, though, he does not have a right to a tape recorder. Your contract must require a pre-discharge conference with a committee of union members. Wish you could get that out of the contract if it's there. Ours would have allowed him to file a grievance over the suspension or file a grievance over the termination, but does not require this stumbling block of a group conference prior to termination. You had every right to adjourn the meeting. No union would take that to arbitration and if they did, no arbitrator would uphold his right to tape the meeting.