The 3-2 ruling on a group of cases, known together as Kentucky River, says employers can label workers as supervisors if the workers assign another employee to a particular location, to work at a certain time or to perform a significant task. They also may be called supervisors if they’re held accountable for the tasks they assign. The three cases involved registered nurses and other skilled workers.

“Employers now have a road map for excluding workers from a union,” notes AFT vice president Candice Owley, chair of the AFT Healthcare program and policy council. The AFT represents 70,000 nurses and other health professionals.

NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh, who cast the dissenting votes, say the “decision threatens to create a new class of workers under federal labor law: workers who have neither the genuine prerogatives of management, nor the statutory rights of ordinary employees.”

Liebman and Walsh say that by 2012, the number of professionals who might be considered bosses could number almost 34 million—nearly one-quarter of the U.S. workforce.

AFL-CIO president John Sweeney says the “decision is the latest in the Bush-appointed NLRB’s legal maneuvering to deny as many workers as possible their basic right to have a voice on the job and improve their living standards through their union.”

The NLRB rejected calls from a bipartisan group of members of Congress to hold oral arguments on the cases that led to the ruling. The NLRB has not held oral arguments on any case since President Bush came to office.

“It is a sad day for every American who works to put food on the table and gas in their cars, when the rights they count on can be cynically eviscerated by a Labor Board that is informed more by political ideology than sound legal analysis,” says Sweeney.