Worker Protection

Private sector firms receive billions of dollars each year in federal government contracts for goods and services. Although these firms generally profit from their business with the federal government, some also violate federal laws that protect the rights of employees to bargain collectively. Legislation is pending before Congress that would debar firms showing "a clear pattern and practice" of violating the National Labor Relations Act from receiving federal contracts. This report identifies the extent to which violators of the Act include employers who have contracts with the government. More specifically, GAO identifies characteristics associated with these federal contractors and their violations of the act and identifies ways to improve compliance of federal contractors with the act.

GAO found that: (1) in 1993, six firms held 90 percent of the federal contracts awarded to NLRA violators; (2) the cases brought to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) mainly involved workers' rights, collective bargaining, and discrimination violations; (3) NLRB remedies mainly included the reinstatement of unlawfully fired workers, restoration of workers' job status, payment of back wages or benefits, collective bargaining orders, and orders to cease threatening workers with job loss; (4) the NLRB remedies affected nearly 1,000 individual workers and thousands of additional workers represented by 12 bargaining units; (5) most of the NLRA violators were Departments of Defense and Energy contractors; (6) 15 of the 80 violators had to reinstate or restore more than 20 individuals each, NLRB cease and desist orders issued against them, or a history of NLRA violations; and (7) NLRB could enhance its enforcement of NLRA by collecting judgments against violators from their federal contract awards and increasing coordination with the General Services Administration (GSA) to identify such violators.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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