exceeding your commitments under a collective bargaining agreement

hrnorth · April 2001

If I want to give employees in a bargaining unit some pay that is over and above what I am required to do under our labor agreement, what limitations do I face? I'm not worried about precedent for our future operations, as the plant is closing,but we want to know what trouble we can get ourselves into for failure to bargain these extra benefits if we just do them unilaterally. If we tell the union we're going to do it and they don't object can we rely on that?

Margaret Morford · April 2001

I have done this in the past. We checked with our labor attorney and there was no legal problem. I had the union rep meet us at the facility to make an announcement. I didn't tell him what it was about because I didn't want to wind up in a long drawn out discussion about doing something extra for our employees. I made the announcement about additional pay and then turned to the Union Rep and said, "My attorney tells me that you have to agree to these additional increases." I then laughed and said "I'm assuming that there's not problem." I later told the Rep that I did it so that the bargaining unit would get to see his public agreement to do something positive for the bargaining unit. Of course, it had the added benefit of ensuring that the employees understood that this was something that we choose to do for them, not something the union persuaded us to do or forced us to do.

If you want to discuss further, call me at 615-371-8200.

Margaret Morford · April 2001

Doug Witte, our attorney editor out of Wisconsin (608-257-4812), called me and said that to be absolutely legally correct, you would need to give the union some advance notice of what you are going to do. The NLRA requires that the union have the ability to bargain about this if they choose to do so. He did say that you could ask the union rep to meet you 15 minutes before the meeting, inform him about what you wanted to do and then announce to the employee group that this was your proposal to the union. He also suggested that you might fax the union a letter to inform them that as of a certain date, you planned to the following and to notify you whether they wished to bargain over it. You could then announce to your employee group that this was your proposal to the union and that you planned to implement this plan as of this date, unless the union had any objection. Obviously, how you handle this depends on your relationship with your union.

hrnorth · April 2001

Thanks for the help; I think this forum is a great one!

exceeding your commitments under a collective bargaining agreement

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