US Senate confirms Trump nominees for labor board, cementing Republican control

By Daniel Wiessner

Aug 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Friday confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominees for two spots on the agency that enforces federal labor law, giving Republicans enough votes to undo a series of key decisions that were widely seen as a boost to union organizing.

The Republican-led Senate voted 51-47 to approve a bloc of more than 70 nominees for various roles across the federal government, including James Macy and David Prouty to serve on the National Labor Relations Board.

Macy, a Republican, has held multiple roles at the U.S. Department of Labor since last year after a four-decade career representing employers in labor cases. Prouty, a former union lawyer who joined the NLRB in 2021 and is its only Democratic member, will serve a second term. 

The five-member labor board already had a 2-1 Republican majority before the Senate vote. By tradition, the board has ​two Democrats, two Republicans and a chair from the president’s party. 

Macy and Prouty could not immediately be reached for comment. 

THIRD VOTE IS KEY

The NLRB oversees union elections and vets complaints by private-sector workers and unions alleging illegal interference with union organizing and other unlawful labor practices. 

The general counsel’s office can file formal complaints that are first heard by administrative judges and then the board, whose decisions can be appealed to federal appeals courts. That in-house process is being challenged in a series of pending lawsuits by companies including Amazon.com and SpaceX that say it violates the U.S. Constitution. 

By tradition, the board requires three members to vote in favor of overruling existing precedent, and Trump’s other appointees, Scott Mayer and James Murphy, said during confirmation proceedings last year that they would not break with that practice.

Trump’s appointees are expected to target a series of labor board ​policies favored by unions that ​have helped fuel a ⁠spike in union organizing in recent years. 

Murphy, whom Trump appointed chair, and Mayer have already revived a rule adopted by the board during Trump’s ⁠first term that makes it more difficult to hold companies liable as the “joint employers” of contract and franchise workers and relinquished jurisdiction over a case involving SpaceX to a different federal labor agency.

TRUMP FIRING

The labor board lost a three-member quorum and could not decide cases last year when Trump took the unprecedented step of firing Democratic member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving hundreds of cases undecided for nearly a year. 

Wilcox sued ​and was briefly reinstated by ⁠a judge, but a federal appeals court paused and then reversed that ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld Trump’s removal of a Democratic member of the Federal Trade ​Commission, finding that a law shielding FTC commissioners from being removed without cause was invalid. 

Wilcox’s case turns ​on a nearly identical ⁠law applying to NLRB members. Her petition for Supreme Court review of that decision is pending.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lisa Shumaker)