National Affairs: A Look at the Books

If there is one thing short of more money that a union would like to get from an employer, it is a look at the company’s payroll. Last week, in a precedent-setting decision, the National Labor Relations Board obliged.

The NLRB ruled that when the information is demanded for collective-bargaining purposes, a company must give a union complete payroll data for a full year on all its employees in the bargaining unit represented by the union—including non-union as well as union workers. Unions, said the NLRB, needed such facts “to bargain intelligently.”