The National Labor Relations Board has announced that it will delay its new rule, issued in August, calling for employers to put up posters informing workers of their right to join or refuse to join a union. Naturally, in September, the Chamber of Commerce sued to block the rule from going into effect. Friday, the NLRB:

[A]greed to postpone the effective date of its employee rights notice-posting rule at the request of the federal court in Washington, DC hearing a legal challenge regarding the rule. The Board’s ruling states that it has determined that postponing the effective date of the rule would facilitate the resolution of the legal challenges that have been filed with respect to the rule. The new implementation date is April 30, 2012.

The posters, which are to be 11×17 size but can be printed on two pieces of 8.5×11 paper for businesses without the capacity to print 11×17, are to be hung alongside other legally required notices. It’s this kind of huge burden on employers that leads the Chamber to really freak out:

“At a time when the private sector is striving to create desperately needed new jobs, it is disappointing to see that the NLRB is imposing new and unnecessary regulations on employers,” Randy Johnson, the Chamber’s senior vice president for Labor, Immigration, and Employee Benefits, said in September. “The latest rule is part of the NLRB’s pattern of tipping the scale in favor of unions, at the expense of employers and employees alike.”

The poster “tips the scale” by listing rights that workers already have under the National Labor Relations Act. It creates no new rights except that of reading your rights on the wall of your workplace.

This blog originally appeared in Daily Kos Labor on December 23, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos. She has a PhD in sociology from Princeton University and has taught at Dartmouth College. From 2008 to 2011, she was senior writer at Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.