On the links above you will find the following:

Board – a list of State Labor Relations Board members with background information.
Decisions –links to original charges and decisions with our analysis.
Charges – original charges filed including those that were not approved for a hearing.
News – links to published information on the SLRB.
Contact – find information about OSPRI and how to contact us.
Timelines – timelines for each case that gets a hearing.

We provide this information so that interested Rhode Islanders will be better informed on the processes of the Board at a time that has propelled this institution to the front of the public consciousness.

Early 2009 court rulings in the dispute between the East Providence School Committee and the East Providence Teachers Association have focused attention on a largely obscure state board that referees debates between management and labor, The Rhode Island State Labor Relations Board (SLRB).

The SLRB oversees union elections and acts as a sort of court to decide whether laws that cover unions’ dealing with employees have been broken and fair in the public sector.  Some of these labor laws require government councils and boards to negotiate with employee unions in a good faith effort to reach agreement on wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment.

The East Providence case now moves from the courts which refused primary jurisdiction to this little known board. What public information is available regarding the board and its operations has caused taxpayers to be concerned that the process is biased in favor of labor. And these are not new concerns. In 2004, Governor Carcieri called for several SLRB members to resign after they ruled that child care workers should be unionized and considered state employees – a decision that was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. At that time it was noted that eight of the last nine SLRB decisions taken to the Supreme Court had been overturned.

Now, in 2009, we were confronted with another unsettling action from the SLRB that once again raises the question of labor bias uninformed by wider policy concerns. The East Providence School Committee filed an "unfair labor practices" charge against the teachers’ union with over three pages describing perceived obstacles to the negotiation process created by the union. The union filed a complaint over the same circumstances consisting of only a few lines, with the only alleged unfair behavior being that, “no substantive discussions had occurred.”

Despite the carefully documented allegations of the School Committee regarding the Union's behavior, that, if true, seemed to form a strong case against the union for "refusal to bargain", the SLRB dismissed the school board's filing administratively without a formal hearing in a closed session of which no record is available. Yet the SLRB sustained the charges of the union as a complaint deserving of hearing despite the fact that they do not state any unfair practice, only alleging that no substantive discussions have occurred with no particularized charges that, if true, could place the blame for this circumstance on the school board. 

How these administrative decisions are made is, itself, a mystery, as discussions are held behind closed doors. It is easy to see why the public would be suspicious of the process given this disparate treatment meted out to labor and management in this case.

All charges (even prior to board complaint and hearing) and pleadings are public records, but none are posted on the SLRB website. The minutes of meetings are completely without any information or summary regarding the basis for board actions and the nature of any dissent, and they detail frequent retreat to executive session that violates the spirit, and potentially the letter, of the Rhode Island Open Meetings Law. 

Cynicism about the responsiveness of government in Rhode Island is nothing new, but the Ocean State Policy Research Institute is committed to informed public discourse. Thus we undertook to educate ourselves regarding the body of work that represents evidence of the SLRB's prejudices, whatever they might be. The unmistakable conclusion one reaches is that the SLRB lacks transparency and its process leans towards labor on every major decision we researched.

Our work is ongoing, but results from the last three years, combined with the earlier history of rulings overturned by the Court suggest that the actual formal decisions of the board are skewed towards labor. While all the formal decisions are well reasoned, that is different from saying that they are correctly decided. These kind of decisions depend on analogy to previous decisions and interpretations of statutes, rules and regulations. Simply because the board makes a plausible argument for its decisions in favor of labor does not mean that these decisions are right. 

It could be equally argued there is no evidence that the decisions are wrong, but the extent to which the Board has lost in court suggests that scholarly window dressing doesn't necessarily make their work defensible. For instance, they tend to regard patterns of historic practice as controlling when it benefits labor, but as unconvincing if it would benefit management. This type of double standard emerges when looking at their entire body of decisions.

If this were simply a number of close calls going in both directions, we could have no complaint. Instead, what emerges is that a majority on the board formed by the appointment of a 'union partisan' to a management seat makes the body more open to the perspective of labor. Of course Governor Carcieri is to blame for those appointments. It was early in his term and represented an explicitly conciliatory gesture towards rapprochement with the government workforce and it union representatives. But it has proven naive, at best, to think that by continuing this absurd structure of a board that was supposed to balance labor and management interests, that, indeed, such a balance would occur.