Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act

The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (or LMRDA), also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act (for its sponsors, Democrat Phil Landrum and Republican Robert P. Griffin), is a United States labor law that regulates labor unions' internal affairs and their officials' relationships with employers.

Enacted in 1959 after revelations of corruption and undemocratic practices in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International Longshoremen's Association, United Mine Workers and other unions received wide public attention, the Act requires unions to hold secret elections for local union offices on a regular basis and provides for review by the United States Department of Labor of union members' claims of improper election activity.

Other provisions of the law:

*Bar members of the Communist Party and convicted felons from holding union office.
*Require unions to submit annual financial reports to the DOL.
*Declare that every union officer must act as a fiduciary in handling the assets and conducting the affairs of the union.
*Limit the power of unions to put subordinate bodies in trusteeship, a temporary suspension of democratic processes within a union.
*Provide certain minimum standards before a union may expel or take other disciplinary action against a member of the union.

The LMRDA covers both workers and unions covered by the National Labor Relations Act ("Wagner Act") and workers and unions in the railroad and airline industries, who are covered by the Railway Labor Act. The LMRDA does not, as a general rule, cover public sector employees, who are not covered by either the NLRA or the RLA. The LMRDA likewise does not displace state laws governing unions' relations with their members except to the extent that those state laws would conflict with federal law.

Congress also amended the National Labor Relations Act, as part of the same piece of legislation that created the LMRDA, by tightening the Taft-Hartley Act's prohibitions against secondary boycotts, prohibiting certain types of "hot cargo" agreements, under which an employer agreed to cease doing business with other employers, and empowered the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board to seek an injunction against a union that engages in recognitional picketing of an employer for more than thirty days without filing a petition for representation with the NLRB.

Union members may enforce their LMRDA rights through private lawsuit or, in some cases, through [http://www.dol.gov/esa/olms_org.htm the US Department of Labor] . The [http://www.uniondemocracy.org/ Association for Union Democracy] offers assistance to union members.

ee also

* National Labor Relations Act
* Norris-LaGuardia Act
* Taft-Hartley Act
* List of United States federal legislation

External links

* [http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/statutes/olms/lmrda.htm Amended text of LMRDA from the Department of Labor]
* [http://www.dol.gov/esa/olms_org.htm More information on the LMRDA from the Department of Labor]
* [http://erds.dol-esa.gov/query/getOrgQry.do View Union Financial Reports from DOL website]