Joe Biden was the first president to join a picket line of the Union and support next to work in several important disputes. Its appointments for the National Board of Labor Relations, the main administrative agency that manages the labor management conflict, interpreted the National Labor Relations Law of 90 years to improve the rights of workers to organize. The Biden Board promoted labor democracy more effectively than any of its predecessors.
As the saying goes, no good action is unpunished.
President Trump's second mandate foreshadows the designated Most Anti-Laboratory Board (his first-term NLRB had the same distinction). And equally or more problematic, Trump, through his arbitrary dismissal of the member of the Board designated by Biden, Gwynne Wilcox has joined An advanced position by management labor lawyers In Starbucks, the Space X of Trader Joe and Elon Musk, among others. Together they want to bring a demolition ball to the Labor Law, stating that the National Labor Relations Law of 90 years and the independent agency that established are unconstitutional.
On March 6, in a general opinion, both eloquent and academic, the American district judge Beryl Howell retreated against the illegal dismissal of Wilcox president. Now, as was surely the plan all the time, the question of the control of the NLRB can and will go to the Supreme Court. If the conservative majority, designated by Trump, agree with the president, instead of defending almost a century of precedents, the due independent process for work and management will be eliminated.
Of course, policy and labor law have always had an uncomfortable coexistence. Under the five -year staggered dating system of the National Labor Relations Law to the NLRB, the presidents can influence the address of the Board during their terms of four years, but cannot dominate it or dictate the result of a particular case that is before the Labor Board.
However, if the members of the Board can be fired by a president every time they do not agree with their votes on the restoration of a dismissed worker, say, or a conclusion that work or management has not negotiated in good faith, the rule of law can be easily denied, along with well -accepted principles of independent conflict resolution.
Such perspective is a sinister cloud over a labor movement that even during the friend of the Biden era lost ground. Today unions represent only 11.1% of employees in the workforce. All this means that organized labor law is a condemned dinosaur, irrevocably directed towards irrelevance? Not necessarily.
First, by important that legal protections have been the organization, the law has proven to be a subordinate factor in the growth or decrease of union. In the 1930s, the Union's militancy was in force at least four years before the National Labor Relations Law came into force. The amendments of TAFT-Hartley of 1947 to the law imposed restrictions on unions and workers, however, the unions continued to grow for almost a decade after their promulgation. Labor won considerably more of his elections in the workplace in the era of George W. Bush than under a more pro-labor board during the Obama administration.
According to data from the US Labor Department, the unions have $ 42 billion in financial assets. They can use these funds to finance expensive and prolonged campaigns in many different companies, hiring dedicated workers who will pay their heartless attention to the difficult organization work. And these positions could become more attractive due to the promise of progress to union leadership positions, now too often the province of those who process membership complaints instead of working to expand the scope of the unions.
The scenario has been established for such organization, with recent uses of the strike weapon. In 2023, the new Roll strike strategy of United Auto Workers against the 3 large car companies produced substantial salary increases and benefits. In January, the International Longshoremen Association. It obtained more than one salary increase of 60% for six years, plus an apparent prohibition of automation, on the basis of a brief unemployment the past autumn in the ports on the east and gulf coast.
In addition, if Trump is partially successful in his attempt to free the country of immigrants, a result will be a shortage of workers, which will incline the labor market towards sellers. The impact on construction, for example, a sector that is already short of hundreds of thousands of hiring, will only improve the perspectives of the unions.
And finally, if the Supreme Court uses the Wilcox case to consider the National Labor Relations Law and an unconstitutional independent NLRB, or invades to consign them to irrelevance, states such as New York, California, Michigan, Illinois and others can work to occupy the void with a more robust legislation.
The fight is not over.
William B. Gould IV, Professor of Emeritus Law at Stanford Law and president of the National Board of Labor Relations, is the author of “Those who travel and are loaded: Memoirs of a Labor Lawyer.”
