Am Law 200 Firm Pinched For Labor Law Violations

And then right here is the part you can’t tell the feds about….

With the Supreme Court running roughshod over decades of labor law precedent, one may forgive an employer for thinking they might be able to pull a fast one while the NLRB seems asleep at the switch. But 400-attorney law firms aren’t supposed to have this much trouble following the law.

Goldberg Segalla has roughly 1000 employees overall and the firm spent a considerable amount of effort trying to convince them that they couldn’t share details of their salary with each other. As you might recall, silencing salary talk is how Lilly Ledbetter’s employer managed to systematically rob her of fair wages for years. It’s an effective tool for suppressing labor’s power to stand up for itself. It is, for these reasons, entirely illegal to squelch salary talk.

That said, employers do it all the time, subtly and not-so-subtly suggesting to employees that they shouldn’t be getting together to uncover what the firm’s doing. And it’s super ill-advised to put this in writing, but shockingly that’s exactly what Goldberg did, forcing employees to sign a “confidentiality agreement” that pledged to terminate any employee who shared information about his or her salary with another employee.

The NLRB was not amused.

Pursuant to a settlement with the NLRB, the 28 office firm had to put out a flashy disclaimer walking back their confidentiality agreement and reminding employees that they have basic labor rights and that, no, they will not be enforcing the confidentiality agreement they made everyone sign.

It sounds as though all’s well that end’s well as far as the firm and the NLRB are concerned, but seriously how does something like this happen? Goldberg has an NLRB practice — they release client alerts on NLRB opinions all the time. Yet no one was in a position to veer the firm away from this practice? Perhaps it’s time to loop those lawyers into firm administration….

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Am Law 200 Firm Pinched For Labor Law Violations curated from Above the Law