Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act - Overview

Overview

Important provisions of the law were as follows:

  • Unions had to hold secret elections, reviewable by the Department of Labor.
  • Union members are protected against abuses by a bill of rights that includes guarantees of freedom of speech and periodic secret elections of officers.
  • Bar members of the Communist Party and convicted felons from holding union office.
  • Require unions to submit annual financial reports to the DOL.
  • Declare that every union officer must act as a fiduciary in handling the assets and conducting the affairs of the union.
  • Limit the power of unions to put subordinate bodies in trusteeship, a temporary suspension of democratic processes within a union.
  • Provide certain minimum standards before a union may expel or take other disciplinary action against a member of the union.

The LMRDA covers both workers and unions covered by the National Labor Relations Act ("Wagner Act") and workers and unions in the railroad and airline industries, who are covered by the Railway Labor Act. The LMRDA does not, as a general rule, cover public sector employees, who are not covered by either the NLRA or the RLA. The LMRDA likewise does not displace state laws governing unions' relations with their members except to the extent that those state laws would conflict with federal law.

Congress also amended the National Labor Relations Act, as part of the same piece of legislation that created the LMRDA, by tightening the Taft-Hartley Act's prohibitions against secondary boycotts, prohibiting certain types of "hot cargo" agreements, under which an employer agreed to cease doing business with other employers, and empowered the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board to seek an injunction against a union that engages in recognitional picketing of an employer for more than thirty days without filing a petition for representation with the NLRB.

Union members may enforce their LMRDA rights through private lawsuit or, in some cases, through the US Department of Labor.

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