NLRB v. Borg-Warner Corp., , was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that insisting that non-mandatory subjects must be bargained for before the acceptance of a collective bargaining agreement is an unfair labor practice.
Description.
Essentially, the opinion of the Court was that the NLRA's good faith bargaining clause required employers to agree to contracts where the remaining disputes were over non-mandatory subjects. In dissent, Harlan contended that the Act had no such affirmative requirement. His reading of the statute was that it did not prohibit good-faith bargaining over non-mandatory subjects.
The NLRB and courts determined which aspects of a contract were non-mandatory. Therefore, in practice, courts could hold that certain subjects were non-mandatory and the "Borg-Warner" rule would prevent those subjects from being included in union contracts at all.