The long-awaited but hardly surprising ruling that nursing supervisors have no right to join a union was finally handed down by the National Labor Relations Board, reports the Los Angeles Times. The board now has a majority of Republican appointees who have pushed this policy limiting union membership.

The ruling turned on the definition of a supervisor’s duties. The board determined that the term “assign” could include dispatching an employee to a workstation, appointing an employee to a specific shift or to work overtime, or directing a nurse to care for a particular patient.

The case before the board concerned nurses but is expected to have wide application in service industries, which unions have tried to organize in recent years. Already, notes the paper, retail and restaurant workers have been reclassifed as supervisors so they will not be entitled to overtime. In many of these cases, little of the work is really supervisory.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce General Counsel Stephen Bokat tells the paper that the biggest impact will be at work sites where unions are organizing workers. Established relationships will probably stay in place.

One nurses’ union official tells the paper that the ruling opens the door to reclassifiying any worker who uses her own judgment. But as the paper points out, reclassified supervisors have won class action suits where courts decided that they really weren’t managers.