Democrats Are Letting a Vital Chance to Protect Workers Slip Away

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/senate-nlrb-vote-deadline/?custno=

Politics / November 13, 2024

The Senate has yet to reconfirm the chair of the National Labor Relations Board—a crucial bulwark against the oncoming Trump onslaught.

Chris Lehmann


Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) participates in an event on September 18, 2024, on the lower west terrace of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, to hammer the first nails into the platform that will be built for the presidential inauguration.
(Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)

For all the agita now seizing Democrats over their vanishing appeal to working-class voters, there’s an imminent test of the party’s ability to deliver a significant victory for American workers: a vote to reconfirm National Labor Relations Board chair Lauren McFarren. In August, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Bernie Sanders, voted to move McFarren’s confirmation to a full floor vote, but her nomination has languished since then. Now, with Republicans set to take control of the Senate in January, there’s no time to waste in getting McFarren over the line.

The NLRB has been instrumental in protecting and expanding workers’ rights during the Biden administration. It’s issued rulings that punish employers for retaliating against workplace organizing drives, reversed a series of anti-worker Trump administration directives, and secured basic collective bargaining rights for on-site workers as well as independent contractors. Much of this record is thanks to the aggressive work of NLRB Lead Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, but McFarren has also played a critical role in reviving the agency’s original mission as a first-line defender of collective bargaining rights in the workplace.

It’s already an indictment of the Democrats’ haphazard attention to fundamental workers’ rights that McFarren’s confirmation has dragged on to the end of the 118th Congress—yet this neglect is part of a regrettable larger pattern. It was only after a protracted lobbying effort that the agency won a nominal budget increase in the 2023 omnibus appropriations bill, well shy of the 10 percent hike it had requested, and woefully short of what’s needed for NLRB officials to keep pace with a burgeoning workload and staffing shortages. And even this modest outlay was the agency’s first budget increase since 2014. Meanwhile, Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Sanders’s House counterpart, staged cynical hearings to target the NLRB’s support for workers’ rights as an arm of partisan Democratic electoral efforts; the panel’s efforts went nowhere legislatively, but tied up more of the agency’s scarce resources in the bid to defend its autonomy and legitimacy.

The NLRB’s track record under Biden has also spawned militant private-sector pushback. Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, SpaceX, and Amazon—all companies seeking to rescind or forestall organizing drives among their workforces—have filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the agency. Right-wing legal advocacy groups such as the Federalist Society have also begun circling around the agency’s Cemex ruling, which held that employers found to have engaged in unfair labor practices prior to a union election are bound to recognize and bargain with the union.

FULL story at link above.