How Ernie Boch Jr. closed the book on labor fight

Flamboyant auto dealer Ernie Boch Jr. may finally be done with a long and ugly labor fight at Boch Honda in Norwood, Mass., near Boston. The store was found by the National Labor Relations Board last month to have unlawfully instituted policies that violated employee rights to comment on social media and wear union pins on the job. But while Boch, known for his zany commercials and big-volume vehicle sales, lost the battle, he ultimately won the war. The union that organized 25 mechanics and technicians at Boch Honda in November 2010 never got a contract. It was decertified about two years later. The NLRB ruling, which forced Boch Honda to admit its violations in a notice to employees this month, is just the final legal chapter in a union-organizing drive that ended long ago, said Mike Vartabedian, a Boston business representative for the Machinists union District Lodge 15. "Ernie Boch won by breaking the union and getting us out of there," said Vartabedian. He said the union has no plans to try to organize the store again or others owned by Boch. Attorneys for Boch did not return repeated calls for comment. The NLRB ruling last month was against Boch Imports, which does business as Boch Honda. The board found that the store had overly broad employment rules, potentially restricting the ability of employees to express themselves on social media, comment on how the store is operated and wear logos and pins, including those of unions. The 2-1 NLRB decision clarified a previous ruling by an administrative law judge in January 2014. As a result, Boch Honda had to notify employees this month that the NLRB had found it to have violated federal labor law and present a laundry list of actions it would no longer engage in. Specifically, the store declared that it would not prohibit employees from providing information about one another, interfere with social media postings, require employees to get management permission before talking to the media or prohibit employees with public contact from wearing pins and insignias. Many of those changes were codified in store handbook revisions in 2013 but not to the satisfaction of two of the three NLRB members who heard the case, documents from the case show. Handbook hassles

How Ernie Boch Jr. closed the book on labor fight

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