Supreme Court Declines Review of NLRB's Adjudicative Precedent Interpretation
The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a petition in the case of Rieth-Riley Construction Co. v. NLRB. The employer, Rieth-Riley Construction Co., had argued that the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals improperly allowed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to reinterpret one of its own long-standing precedents without independently analyzing the precedent's original meaning. The case centered on the NLRB's 1958 decision in Retail Associates, which governs withdrawal from multiemployer bargaining units. Rieth-Riley contended that the NLRB effectively rewrote this rule by interpreting 'the agreed-upon date' for bargaining to begin as 'any agreed-upon date,' thereby allowing a union to withdraw even when no specific bargaining date had been set. The employer argued that this interpretation nullified part of the original rule and contradicted the text of the Board's own precedent, and that the Sixth Circuit wrongly deferred to the agency's reading.
