Violation Tracker Documents Back Pay Awards in Unfair Labor Practice Cases

June 14, 2017

Washington, DC — The latest addition to Violation Tracker, the country’s first public database of corporate crime and misconduct, includes 3,000 back pay awards made by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in unfair labor practice cases since the beginning of 2010. Violation Tracker, a public service of Good Jobs First’s Corporate Research Project, is freely available at https://goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker.

The records, most of which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to the NLRB, show a total of more than $284 million in back pay awards. That figure excludes so-called non-Board settlements (those reached by the parties before the NLRB has ruled on the matter). The agency excluded those awards from the FOIA response on the grounds that some are confidential.

The largest single Board-mandated award to workers during the period was $22.8 million paid by coal mining company Massey Energy (now part of Alpha Natural Resources), which had been found to have committed unfair labor practices when it refused to recognize the United Mine Workers after it purchased a unionized West Virginia mining operation and declined to continue the employment of most of the union members. (While this long-running dispute was playing out, the Upper Big Branch mine disaster killed 29 workers at another of Massey’s West Virginia mines.)

Among the other biggest NLRB back pay awards since 2010 are: $16.2 million paid by Midwest Generation (a subsidiary of NRG Energy), $10.7 million paid by Delphi Packard Electric (part of Delphi Automotive), $10.3 million paid by Fluor-Daniel (a unit of the engineering company Fluor), and $10 million paid by Momentive Performance Materials.

“The NLRB dataset is an important addition to Violation Tracker,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on the database. “The Board issues press releases about only a small number of back pay awards and does not make data about other awards easily retrievable in the case information on its website. This new feature of Violation Tracker appears to be the first time extensive NLRB back-pay award data is readily available online.”

Along with the NLRB data, Violation Tracker has also been updated with recent entries from the more than 40 federal regulatory agencies already covered by the website.

Also new on the site are links on the parent-company summary pages to the pages for those companies in the Project On Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database and in the list of the 100 largest federal contractors on POGO’s FedSpending site.

Violation Tracker now contains more than 161,000 entries with total penalties of more than $324 billion, most of that connected to some 2,460 large parent companies whose disparate individual entries are linked together in the database. Coverage currently begins in January 2010 but will be extended back to January 2000 later this year.

Contact: Philip Mattera (202) 725-7906 or [email protected]

Good Jobs First is a non-profit, non-partisan resource center promoting accountability in economic development. Based in Washington DC, it was founded in 1998. Its Corporate Research Project provides research resources for organizations and individuals concerned about all forms of corporate accountability. The initial version of Violation Tracker was made possible by a grant from the Bauman Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Surdna Foundation, the MMHBO Fund, and The Reva & David Logan Foundation.