By Daniel Wiessner
Dec 18 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominees to fill vacancies on the agency that enforces federal labor law, restoring its ability to decide cases after months of inactivity in the wake of his unprecedented firing of a sitting member of the National Labor Relations Board.
The Republican-led Senate voted 53-43 along party lines to confirm a slate of 97 Trump nominees for posts throughout the federal government, including Scott Mayer and James Murphy for the NLRB.
Mayer, the chief labor lawyer at Boeing, and Murphy, a retired career NLRB staff lawyer, were confirmed to two of the five seats on the board, which decides private-sector labor disputes.
The board had lost a quorum of at least three members needed to decide cases when Trump fired Democrat Gwynne Wilcox in January, which was the first time a president had removed an NLRB member. It was left with a single member, Democrat David Prouty, after a Republican’s term expired in August.
UNION-FRIENDLY RULINGS AT RISK
The new Republican NLRB majority is expected to revisit a series of recent board decisions seen as favoring unions, and will grapple with a backlog of hundreds of cases that stalled in the wake of Wilcox’s removal.
Trump’s appointees to the board are expected to undo a series of decisions issued by Wilcox and other appointees of Democratic former President Joe Biden that have been criticized by business groups and Republican lawmakers.
Under a decades-old policy, the board typically does not overturn its existing precedent unless three members vote to do so. Trump has not yet named a nominee that would give the board a third Republican member, but Mayer and Murphy in the meantime could issue decisions narrowing the reach of Biden-era decisions.
That includes a 2023 ruling that allows unions to represent workers in some instances even after losing an election, a ban on the common employer practice of holding mandatory meetings to discourage unionizing and an expansion of monetary remedies available to workers who are fired for supporting unions or other protected conduct.
The Senate on Thursday also voted to confirm Crystal Carey, a partner at major labor law firm Morgan Lewis, to serve as the agency’s general counsel, whose office oversees union elections and prosecutes cases accusing employers and unions of illegal labor practices. The general counsel plays an important policymaking role by deciding what issues and legal arguments to bring before the board.
The new members are joining the board at a time when its historical independence from the White House is being tested.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on whether Trump’s firing of a Federal Trade Commission member was lawful, and the decision will likely impact the NLRB and dozens of other multi-member federal agencies.
Wilcox sued Trump over her removal and an appeals court recently ruled against her, saying that a law shielding board members from being removed at will violated the U.S. Constitution.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York and Karen Sloan; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Jamie Freed)
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