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decision-making is required under the law, basing this theory on an old NLRB case, Joy Silk, even though the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected mandatory card-check recognition.

• Discard “card check.” Congress should discard “card check” as the basis of union recognition and mandate the secret ballot exclusively.

Contract Bar Rule. Although current labor law allows a union to establish itself at a workplace at more or less any time, the calendar for any attempt to decertify a union is considerably more constrained. If a union is recognized as a collective bargaining agent, then employees may not decertify it or substitute another union for it for at least one year under federal law (the “certification bar”). Similarly, when aunion reaches a collective bargaining agreement with an employer, it is immune from a decertification election for up to three years (the “contract bar”). A typical consequence of these rules is that employees must often wait four years before they are allowed a chance at decertification. Employees then have only a 45-day window to file a decertification petition; ifthe employer and union sign a successor contract, then the contract bar comes into play once again—meaning employees with an interest in decertification must wait another three years.

• Eliminate the contract bar rule. NLRB should eliminate the contract bar rule so that employees with an interest in decertification have a reasonable chance to achieve their goal.

Tailoring National Employment Rules. National employment laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)?! and the Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act” set out one-size-fits-all “floors” regulating the employment relationship. These substantive worker protections often do not mesh well with the procedural worker protections offered through the NLRA’s collective bargaining process. Unions could play a powerful role in tailoring national employment rules to the needs of a particular workplace if, in unionized workplaces, national rules were treated as negotiable defaults rather than non-negotiable floors.

• Congress should amend the NLRA to authorize collective bargaining to treat national employment laws and regulations as negotiable defaults. For example, this reform would allow a union to bless a relaxed overtime trigger (e.g., 45 hours a week, or 80 hours over two weeks) in exchange for firm employer commitments on predictable scheduling.

Alternative Policy. While some conservatives (including the author of this chapter) believe that it would be a mistake to antagonize unions’ core interests, others