EXCLUSIVE: In a major legal victory for the Art Directors Guild and Chuck Parker, its national executive director, the National Labor Relations Board has dismissed a complaint filed by the guild’s former head accountant who claimed that she was fired back in 2020 because she’d been a leader of the successful campaign to unionize the guild’s office staff.
In dismissing the complaint, the NLRB overruled an administrative law judge who determined last year that the accountant, Nicole Oeuvray, had been fired for her union activities, and that the stated reasons that Parker had given for her termination were “pretextual and her discharge was discriminatorily motivated.”
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“We disagree,” a three-member NLRB panel, headed by NLRB Chairwoman Lauren McFerran, said in a ruling handed down on Tuesday. “The reasons listed in the termination notice concerned performance matters that preceded Oeuvray’s union activities.” Therefore, the panel ruled, “We find the discharge was not unlawful.”
McFerran and the panel concluded that the 3,500-member guild, IATSE Local 800, “established that it would have discharged Oeuvray even absent her protected organizing activities. The complaint is therefore dismissed.”
See the ruling dismissing the complaint here.
Oeuvray, who had been the guild’s accountant for 16 years, had been a leader of the campaign to unionize the guild’s staff back in 2019 under the auspices of Local 537 of the Office of Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU). The unionization effort was opposed by Parker and the guild – the “Respondent” in the complaint Oeuvray filed with the NLRB in November 2020.
After three days of hearings, administrative law judge Gerald Etchingham, in a stinging rebuke of Parker and the guild, found that Parker “unlawfully” fired Oeuvray “in retaliation” for her successful efforts to form a union among the guild’s staff of fewer than 30 office workers. The guild subsequently appealed and has now been vindicated.
Parker claimed that she was fired because she’d written a check that bounced due to insufficient funds in a guild account back in 2017; because she was late with her financial reports, and because she wasn’t getting along with some members of the guild’s Illustrators & Matte Artists Council.
Judge Etchingham, however, found that the real reason she was fired was because of her “key role as union organizer.” A key element of his ruling hinged on a profane remark Parker had made during the unionizing effort, when he was overheard loudly saying “Fuck OPEIU.”
In his ruling, Judge Etchingham found that Parker’s profane outburst indicated that he was opposed to the unionization effort and that he “harbored antiunion sentiments.”
But in dismissing the complaint, the NLRB panel concluded that “the evidence in the record regarding this incident is minimal,” that there is “no evidence that the comment was directed at Oeuvray, or anyone else, individually,” and that there is no proof “that Parker’s comment was directed at protected activity rather than a fleeting remark of frustration.”
When Parker fired Oeuvray in May of 2020, she was just three months’ short of vesting in the Motion Picture Industry Health Plan. She pleaded with him to allow her to stay on until September, when, on her 62nd birthday, she’d be fully vested for lifetime health benefits, “rather than lose them because she fell three months short.”
Later that day, however, Parker told her that he had talked it over with the board of directors, and that they and the guild’s treasurer had lost confidence in her work and wanted her to be terminated immediately.
Deadline reached out to Oeuvray and will update this story if she responds.
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