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Featherbedding

Featherbedding

What Is Featherbedding?

The term featherbedding alludes to a labor union practice that expects employers to change their labor force to satisfy union regulations. At the point when unions take part in featherbedding, companies are generally forced to increase their labor costs to fulfill these needs. This might come through hiring a larger number of workers than needed or restricting production to meet contractual provisions.

How Featherbedding Works

Featherbedding is an everyday term that is generally utilized in North America similar to overmanning in the United Kingdom. It happens when labor unions expect employers to increase their labor costs to a degree greater than needed to complete a specific task.

Featherbedding frequently appears as expecting employers to hire extra employees โ€” more than whatever might be needed. It can likewise mean adding tedious, make-work policies and procedures that increase labor costs or taking on practices that lull an organization's production levels and overall productivity.

Featherbedding likewise happens when employees who are not generally required are required to be retained by the union, or when unions demand that employers hire workers who are overqualified for a specific position.

Featherbedding arose as a way for unions to keep individuals employed in the face of mechanical progressions and development.

This practice arose as a way for unions to hold workers as industries developed and carried out mechanical headways to increase productivity. Since featherbedding is in many cases depicted in a negative light, unions regularly deny its presence, even however some [economists](/financial expert) claim the practice may actually help reallocate surplus profits from organizations to employees who might somehow be unemployed.

Detractors claim that featherbedding advances obsolete and inefficient practices and policies, especially those made obsolete by mechanical efficiencies.

Special Considerations

The United States Congress made the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 1935 to implement the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which was passed into law that very year to safeguard the rights and interests of the two employers and workers. The NLRB is enabled to order violators of the NLRA to cease unfair labor practices, paying little mind to what its identity is โ€” employers or labor unions.

The NLRB may likewise direct wrongdoers to give relief to the employees or elements hurt by the wrongful actions through financial compensation.

The NLRA energizes collective bargaining โ€” which happens among employers and labor unions or gatherings of employees to arrange employment terms โ€” and safeguards workers' rights by abridging unfair labor practices in the private sector. The NLRA was amended by the Taft-Hartley Act or the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947. The Taft-Hartley Act placed limitations on the activities of labor unions, forbidding tactics like jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, secondary blacklists, closed shops, and monetary contributions by unions to federal political missions.

Featherbedding is explicitly tended to under Section 8(b)(6) of the act, which peruses:

Unions may not look for payment for services not performed.

Section 8(b)(6) of the Act makes it unlawful for a labor organization or its agents "to cause or endeavor to make an employer pay or deliver or consent to pay or deliver any money or other thing of value, in the idea of an exaction, for services which are not performed or not to be performed."

This section explicitly outlaws practices that make an employer pay for work that isn't performed or for any work that isn't expected to be performed, in spite of the fact that it doesn't outlaw getting payment for performed services that are pointless.

This provision has been deciphered barely by the U.S. High Court, which decided that the NLRA just limits circumstances in which a labor union exacts pay from an employer in return for services not performed or not to be performed. A union might demand payment for work that is actually finished by an employee, with the employer's consent, even if less employees would have accomplished the work too in a similar amount of time.

Features

  • Under featherbedding, companies are generally forced to increase their labor costs to fulfill these needs.
  • Featherbedding is a labor union practice that expects employers to change their labor force to satisfy union regulations.
  • Employers might be required to hire a larger number of employees than needed, add tedious policies and procedures that increase labor costs or embrace practices that lull their productivity.