AT&T Connecticut and the Communications Workers of America were embroiled in bitter contract negotiations in 2009. Among other efforts to let the public know about the dispute, employees, many of whom had to go into customers’ homes, began wearing shirts that said “Inmate” on the front with a black box underneath the lettering. The back of the shirt said “Prisoner of AT$T” with several vertical stripes and bars above and below the letters. The shirt did not have the Union’s name on it. AT&T suspended, for one day, over 100 employees who wore the shirt and who regularly interacted with the public.

Board proceedings ensued and an NLRB ALJ decided that AT&T violated the Act by suspending the employees. In 2011, by a 2 – 1 decision, the Board affirmed the ALJ decision. The Board reasoned that the “special circumstances” doctrine allowing employers to restrict employees from wearing buttons or insignias at work “when the company reasonably believes the message may harm its relationship with its customers and its public image” was not applicable because the “prisoner” shirt was not likely to cause fear or alarm among AT&T customers.

In reversing that decision, in Southern New England Telephone Co. v. NLRB, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit started its opinion with:

Common sense sometimes matters in resolving legal disputes. This case is a good example. AT&T Connecticut banned employees who interact with customers or work in public – including employees who enter customers’ homes – from wearing union shirts that said “Inmate” on the front and “Prisoner of AT$T” on the back. Seems reasonable. No company, at least one that is interested in keeping its customers, presumably wants its employees walking into people’s homes wearing shirts that say “Inmate” and “Prisoner.”

In concluding that the Board’s decision failed to take into account the reasonable and practical conclusion that the message on the shirts was offensive and bound to undermine the company’s relationship with its customers, the Court restated, as it had in a previous case a few years earlier that “the Board’s expertise is surely not at its peak in the realm of employer-customer relations.” Because the Court of Appeals found that the special circumstances exception applied, the one-day suspensions were lawful.

Making the NLRB decision particularly head scratching was that just a few years prior to the events in this case there had been, according to The Hartford Courant, “possibly the most widely publicized crime in the state’s history,” involving a home invasion resulting in the murder of several members of a family.

I’d like to say that it’s a sorry state of affairs that a federal Court of Appeals has to rein in the activity of the NLRB that’s supposed to have expertise in enforcing the statute it’s charged with enforcing, but, of course, this is not the first time the D.C. Court of Appeals has had to step in to do so.