The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, also known as the Landrum-Griffin Act, is a United States labor law statute that imposes minimum standards for labor unions' internal affairs. Enacted in 1959 after revelations concerning 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 office on a regular basis and provides for review by the United States Department of Labor of union members' claims of improper election activity. The Act also bars certain persons from holding union office, requires unions to submit annual financial reports to the DOL, declares that every union officer must act as a fiduciary in handling the assets and conducting the affairs of the union, and limits the power of unions to put subordinate bodies in trusteeship, a temporary suspension of democratic processes within a union.
The LMRDA covers both workers and unions covered by the National Labor Relations 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.
The Act also amended the National Labor Relations Act by tightening the prohibitions against secondary boycotts added by the Taft-Hartley Act, prohibiting certain types of "hot cargo" agreements, under which an employer agreed to cease doing business with other employers, and gave the General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board the power to seek an injunction against a union if it engaged in recognitional picketing of an employer for more than thirty days without filing a petition for representation with the NLRB.
