Surprise! You're a Supervisor!

Hum. The National Labor Relations Board announced early today (or perhaps late yesterday) that it's changing union eligibility rules for charge nurses. Charge nurses are the more experienced nurses within each unit/on each floor who delegate tasks among the rest of the staff, but still they work the floor themselves and get shit on by management along with everyone else. Starting today, they're classified as supervisors and are no longer allowed to unionize, so if they were already in, they've just lost their union protections. Hospital management loves this ruling, of course, because it depresses organizing efforts nationwide by cutting the pool of eligible staff and has a damping effect on young nurses who are already intimidated about joining a union.

The larger concern is the repercussions for quasi-supervisory workers in other fields.

In their dissents, two NLRB members said millions of professionals who have some supervisory duties could be hurt by the ruling.

The decision "threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees," they wrote.

If my occasional NLRB reader stops by, I'd love your take. In the meantime, there's always Colbert.