After reading Dilts, D. (2007). Case 15: Discharge for disruptive conduct, or for protected Union activity?, your group should come to a consensus as to the issues involved and conduct a legal analysis of those issues using the IRAC format discussed in the deep dive in this module. Your analysis should help you to determine whether or not there was a ULP. You can include a dissenting opinion for this case if you cannot achieve a consensus.
Important questions to answer in your analysis include:
- Were company rules No. 18 and 29 in violation of NLRA?
- Employees at times write articles or letters for newspapers openly critical of their employers. Should it make any difference in this case that Fuller himself was an editorial employee of a newspaper?
- Although Fuller wrote and published the “offensive” article on his own time, was his conduct protected under Section 7 of LMRA?
- Do you believe Fuller’s discharge for rules violations was a pretext for terminating him because of his pro-union activities?
- Make sure to consider whether or not there is a legal standard (i.e. case law) discussed in Chapter 4 that should help you to engage in this analysis.
