(PAI) - The first in what could be a series of unhappy steps took place in conjunction with the National Labor Relations Board's Oakwood/Kentucky River decisions, in which nurses and potentially millions of workers could be declared supervisors and thus unprotected by U.S. labor law.

In Roseburg, Ore., before the board's ruling was announced Oct. 3, five full-time charge nurses at recently unionized Mercy Medical Center were excluded from the Oregon Nurses Association local, the Northwest Labor Press reported. Both the local and the hospital managers anticipated the Bush-named majority on the board would rule the way it did.

Furthermore, currently before the NLRB are 54 labor cases that involve determining employee or supervisor status in various professions besides nursing - including construction.

"It's the latest example of how the Bush-appointed NLRB is prepared to use legal maneuvering to deny as many workers as possible their basic right to have a voice on the job through their union," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "The NLRB should protect workers' rights, not eliminate them."

Unions maintain that the Oakwood decision could declare everyone from construction workers to newspaper reporters "supervisors." That, in short, is what the board majority, by identical 3-0 votes, told regional officials to decide in the 54 cases.

In each case, the board said the union and the company must get a new ruling on who is a supervisor and who isn't. Unions contend firms will use that issue to halt organizing, delay elections, clobber bargaining units and cripple workers' rights. And when new contracts come up, firms will cite Oakwood and demand workers' exclusion.

That round of upcoming decisions illustrates a comment by former NLRB General Counsel Fred Feinstein. He said the board opened the way to declaring a worker a "supervisor" even if all he did was tell another worker that the heaviest items should be put at the bottom of a flatbed truck.

In their dissent, NLRB members Wilma Liebman and Dennis Walsh 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."

In other news about the NLRB's landmark ruling, the AFL-CIO took the extraordinary step of filing a formal case with the International Labour Organization contesting the National Labor Relations Board's ruling declaring new groups of workers are supervisors.

The federation wants not just a decision against the U.S. government, but a full-scale international investigation, saying the ruling broke international compacts the U.S. signed.

In its 23-page complaint to the ILO, signed by federation President John J. Sweeney, the AFL-CIO said the ruling in Oakwood Health Care vs. UAW is part of a pattern of destruction of workers' rights in the U.S. that breaks international norms.

"Oakwood strips employees in the new 'supervisor' status of any and all protection," the AFL-CIO told the ILO's Committee on Freedom of Association, which would investigate the complaint. Sweeney, in a statement, said "Bush has stripped millions of America's working people of a fundamental human right recognized all over the globe: The freedom to bargain collectively and have a voice on the job."

Among other things, "employers may fire" newly named 'supervisors' "with impunity if they do not relinquish union membership or if they participate in union activities. Employers can even force these employees, under pain of dismissal, to participate in management's anti-union campaigns," the federation pointed out.

And it quoted internal memos from two notorious union-busters - which pose as law firms - as ready to encourage employers to classify workers as supervisors, removing them from labor law protection and opening them to management dictates.