Robert F. Millman

Millman has been representing employers in collective bargaining and regulatory proceedings with unions for 46 years, including resisting organizing drives and resolving unfair labor practice complaints. He practices regularly before the National Labor Relations Board, the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement and other agencies, as well as in the courts.

This past year, that work was complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. “The impact of COVID-19 on employment law has been nothing short of extraordinary,” he said.

For instance, he represented soft-drink maker National Beverage Corp. during an organizing drive by a Teamsters local. The union already represented workers at one of the company’s two Shasta manufacturing facilities in California and was campaigning to represent workers at the second. At the height of the pandemic, however, many workers were regularly absent from the facility.

Millman helped the company win a solid victory in the mail balloting, and he said one factor was its response to the coronavirus. “The employees had to consider that the company was doing a terrific job on the covid side,” he said. “It was a perfect example of a great employer doing the right thing.”

A good employer communicates well with its employees, ferrets out problems and resolves them, he said. “The reason people try to unionize has nothing to do with money. It has to do with how they’ve been treated.”

Millman also succeeded through difficult negotiations to finalize a collective bargaining agreement between another Teamsters local and Individual FoodService, a large distributor of restaurant food packaging, canned goods and other supplies. The negotiations began in January 2020 and continued throughout much of the pandemic because the bargaining unit rejected four separate management offers before finally reaching an agreement recently.

Last summer, Spanish Broadcasting System Inc. brought him in to help it deal with a number of unfair labor practice charges filed by a SAG/AFTRA unit representing on-air talent. He was able to resolve all of them, including a bad faith bargaining charge. The company and union are continuing to negotiate a new labor contract.

Millman has been with Littler since he graduated from law school in 1974. He was the 18th lawyer at the firm, which now has more than 1,600. He is very proud of the firm and the work that it does, especially the expansive work its special COVID-19 task force did putting on webinars for clients and carefully tracking litigation, regulatory changes and business attitudes throughout the pandemic.

“We represent international corporations all the way down to mom-and-pop companies,” he said. Those small businesses “don’t have general counsel or HR departments. We are proud to take care of companies with 25 employees.”

— Don DeBenedictis