Section 11 Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB

• Library: Employer-Employee Law 2008

As mentioned in §12.3 above, Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB, 502 U.S. 527 (1992), held that nonemployees have no right to picket or handbill for a union on an employer’s private property unless the union first demonstrates that it has no other reasonable means to access the employees. Lechmere amended NLRB v. Babcock & Wilcox Co., 351 U.S. 105 (1956), by making the inaccessibility issue the threshold inquiry and articulating a two-step analysis. The first step involves determining whether the union can establish that it has no reasonable means of communicating to the employees other than entering the employer’s property. Only after the union demonstrates that it has no alternative means of access does the court move to the second level of inquiry, balancing the private property rights and NLRA § 7, 29 U.S.C. § 157, rights as described in Hudgens v. NLRB, 424 U.S. 507 (1976). The Lechmere Court specifically overruled the previous NLRB decision in Jean Country, 291 N.L.R.B. 11 (1988), holding that Jean Country improperly combined these...