Seyfarth Synopsis: In a unanimous decision, a three-member panel of the NLRB found that a cab company violated the NLRA by changing the length of the waiting period for employee health insurance from one year to sixty days.

On May 16, 2017, Chairman Miscimarra, Member Pearce, and Member McFerran upheld an Administrative Law Judge’s determination that Western Cab Company violated Section 8(a)(5) of the NLRA by failing to give notice and an opportunity to bargain to the United Steelworkers during its 2014 implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”).

According to the Board, because the ACA only prohibits waiting periods for employee health insurance of longer than ninety days, the employer had discretion over whether to reduce its one-year waiting period to “a 60-day waiting period….a 30- or 90-day waiting period, or even no waiting period at all.” Therefore, the employer owed the Union notice and an opportunity to bargain over the waiting period and any other aspects of the law that gave the employer discretion in compliance, such as the notice and enrollment and even the overall type of health insurance.

The reality for employers, which was not discussed by the Board, is that quite often employers are forced to attempt to make significant changes very quickly in order to comply with a newly effective law. According to the Board, these changes must be made while also navigating the legal obligation to provide notice and an opportunity to bargain to the Union over the implementation.  This obligation requires that employers have a robust and sophisticated understanding of the requirements of the law, and those aspects that may be discretionary, with enough advance time to allow for notice and bargaining with the Union.

Here, Western Cab received notice from its insurance provider in December 2013 that as of January, the ACA would require a significant shortening of Western Cab’s current waiting period, which at the time was one year. According to testimony before the ALJ, it was the insurance provider that mistakenly indicated that the waiting period under the ACA had to be sixty days.  As a result, Western Cab may not have even been aware when it implemented the sixty-day rule that it had made a discretionary decision.

Although he joined the majority, Chairman Miscimarra took the opportunity in a footnote to re-emphasize that “employers’ compliance with the NLRA should not frustrate their compliance with the complex array of non-NLRA legal obligations that confront them.” Further, in his view, the question is not simply whether the employer had any discretion in implementing the law.  Rather, the Chairman would focus on “whether the actions are similar in kind and degree to what the employer did in the past.”

In addition to finding a violation for failure to bargain over the ACA implementation, the panel also found the employer violated the Act by failing to give pre-imposition notice and an opportunity to bargain over discipline issued during negotiations for a first contract with the Union as required in the Board’s recent Total Security Management decision.  For more information on this disciplinary bargaining obligation, see our September 29, 2016 blog post here.  In a footnote, Chairman Miscimarra reiterated his disagreement with Total Security Management, a telling reminder that reversal may be in the cards should an appropriate case come before the Board when and if President Trump’s nominees to the NLRB are confirmed.

The key takeaway here is that for employers with unionized workforces, any change in terms and conditions of employment, whether positive or negative, requires notification and bargaining with the union.