“Labor is getting beat up and slapped around, but they’re growing,” Harland said of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West at which he serves as general counsel. “They’re really smart and creative in terms of how they approach organizing.”
Harland advises the union on how to run elections in order to grow their base of over 90,000 members, and also to protect workers that he contends are retaliated against for engaging in union activity.
While the work for the union of caregivers takes up much of his time, Harland also was on the winning side of a key National Labor Relations Board decision that the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in June.
The lawyer’s client were caregivers at Piedmont Gardens nursing home in Oakland. Without a collective bargaining agreement for years, the workers went on strike. When they sought to return to work, the nursing home locked them out and said that they had hired new workers.
Harland filed a complaint with the labor board, arguing that the dismissals of about 90 hitherto striking nurses violated their right to engage in concerted activity under the National Labor Relations Act. The board agreed with Harland, but the lawyer voiced skepticism that there will be more union-friendly decisions, now that President Donald Trump has appointed a Republican majority to the NLRB.
“Today the NLRA is being used as a blunt instrument to beat labor,” Harland contended, but added that things are more favorable for a union-friendly lawyer in California.
“We probably have the best labor laws for union workers and nonunion workers,” he said.
— Matthew Blake
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