ALLENTOWN-MACK V. NLRB - IS THE BOARDS GOOD FAITH REASONABLE DOUBT STANDARD IN ITS TWILIGHT

Employers sometimes use in-house employee polls to gauge employees' co ntinuing support for an incumbent union, to verify that the employer's good faith reasonable doubt of the union's majority status was in fac t accurate, and to justify the employer's unilateral withdrawal of rec ognition from the union. However, the National Labor Relations Board h as applied the good faith reasonable doubt standard to require that em ployers only poll when they already have sufficient evidence of employ ee rejection of the union that would allow the unilateral withdrawal o f recognition without polling. Thus employers can only use employee po lls when they have no need to. This article addresses the Supreme Cour t's recent decision in Allentown Mack v. National Labor Relations Boar d, in which the Count addressed this ''puzzling policy'' and chastised the Board for enunciating one legal standard while, in fact, applying another, much stricter standard. This article also discusses what the Supreme Court's decision means for employers in the reasonable good f aith doubt polling and withdrawal of recognition contexts. Equally imp ortant, this article examines those unanswered questions raised by the language of the Court's decision.