K&R

is the freedom to screw employees. Got it.

really needed is a large single union for all retail workers.
That way the majority of retailers would have a hard time playing their favorite game of "Lets see who can screw over their employees the most".

The most important thing is the abolishment of routine "flexible scheduling."

At this point in time, a retailer can, completely legally, schedule someone to work Monday from 2pm to 11pm, Tuesday from 6am to 3pm, Wednesday from 9am to 6pm, give him off Thursday and Friday, then 2pm to 11pm on Saturday and 7am to 4pm on Sunday. And then the next week give him a completely different set of hours, which will be announced the Friday before the work week.

I support a law that would make it so if you work less than 40 hours a week that your employer cannot schedule you for another shift without 12 hours between them also the should be required by law to respect your hours of availability if you dont average over 40 hours a week.

Isn't flexible scheduling one of the first of many things, a union would address?

Making a law that disallowed routinely running "flexible" schedules would be better. There are going to be times when it's not escapable - March and April in a garden center, when people are buying huge amounts of stuff for their yards, comes to mind quickly, as does Christmas - but most of the time, it's bullshit and is a way to keep your employees from getting ahead.

That the board's looking at McDonald's itself is actually a pretty big deal, since major chains usually hide behind the fact that the franchises are nominally autonomous. When that holds up, people wanting to take them to task have to do so on an outlet-by-outlet basis, based on the argument that the local franchisee is the one owning and operating a site, not the corporate office.

So basically it's the freedom to allow the franchise owners to screw their employees - and to screw the franchise owners in turn by throwing them under the bus without consequence if someone calls them out. If things get too hot just writing off an outlet is an option, at which point the problem (and a few dozen peoples' ability to pay rent, mind, but head office won't care about that) goes away.

This is telling their head office, "No, you cannot deflect this back to the individual franchises, because we're holding your entire organization responsible for it."

That's actually a pretty significant stance for the NLRB to take, and it's terrific to see them doing so.