St. Joe’s security guards’ unionizing effort shouldn’t have been blocked, NLRB says
An NLRB panel said the Philadelphia Security Officers Union representing U. Penn traffic control aides doesn't disqualify the union from representing safety officers at the former USciences campus.
A group of campus security guards at the University City campus of St. Joseph’s University, who were blocked from voting to join a security officers’ union last year, may now have the chance to do so.
The National Labor Relations Board issued a decision last week stating that a regional director in Philadelphia was wrong to disqualify the Philadelphia Security Officers Union (PSOU) from representing the St. Joe’s guards.
In May 2022, PSOU filed a petition to represent 40 public safety officers at the campus that was previously University of the Sciences, before that school merged with St. Joseph’s in June 2022. The security guards are employed by Allied Universal Security Services.
Allied Universal challenged the security guards’ petition because PSOU also represents traffic control aides who work at the University of Pennsylvania. It argued the union should be disqualified from representing guards because it also represents non-guard employees.
A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board agreed and dismissed the St. Joe’s officers’ petition in November 2022.
The regional director wrote that the traffic control aides who belong to PSOU are not guards, “are not instructed to protect Penn premises,” and “do not appear to be any different from other employees in nonguard occupations who, during the course of the workday, would report suspicious job-related activity and incidents to their employer or to the police.”
A three-person panel for the NLRB has now reversed that decision. The panel found that Penn’s traffic control aides do perform guard-like duties like “reporting security problems or rules violations” and “respond[ing] to threatening situations when needed.”
As a result, the panel said, PSOU is not disqualified from representing the safety officers at St. Joseph’s.
“We welcome the board’s clarification that the party challenging an employee’s guard status bears the burden of demonstrating that they aren’t guards and agree that Allied Universal didn’t carry its burden in this case,” the PSOU said in a statement provided by its lawyer. “This is an important decision for the PSOU and security officers in and around Philadelphia because it confirms that the PSOU is able to represent them; indeed, representing security officers is the PSOU’s mission.”
Allied Universal did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.
When PSOU asked the NLRB for a review of the regional director’s decision, the union argued that it had been “based on facts not found in the record while ignoring the actual facts.” The union’s brief suggested that the regional director was “vying for any way to find against” PSOU.
Allied Universal had argued that a review was unnecessary because the regional director’s decision “was not clearly erroneous” and was supported by facts found at a hearing.