In a move that’s sure to shake up the labor landscape, the U.S. Senate has confirmed two of President Donald Trump’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), signaling a shift toward a more business-friendly stance.
Newsmax reported that on Thursday, the Senate voted 53-43 along party lines to greenlight a batch of 97 Trump nominees for various federal roles, including the critical NLRB positions.
This confirmation of Scott Mayer, Boeing’s chief labor lawyer, and James Murphy, a retired career NLRB staff lawyer, fills two of the board’s five seats.
The NLRB has been paralyzed since January when Trump made the unprecedented decision to fire Democrat Gwynne Wilcox. Wilcox's firing stripped the board of its quorum, leaving it unable to rule on pressing labor disputes for months.
By August, with a Republican member’s term expiring, only Democrat David Prouty remained, rendering the board a ghost town while hundreds of cases piled up.
Now, with Mayer and Murphy on board, the NLRB boasts a Republican majority, poised to tackle the backlog.
This majority is expected to rethink some of the more progressive rulings from the Biden era that favored unions.
Business groups and Republican lawmakers have long criticized decisions made under Wilcox and Biden appointees, and Trump’s picks are likely to roll back those measures.
Among the targeted rulings are a 2023 decision letting unions represent workers despite losing elections and a ban on mandatory employer meetings discouraging unionizing.
While the NLRB typically needs three members to overturn precedent, and Trump hasn’t yet named a third Republican, Mayer and Murphy can still narrow the scope of these policies.
In the same Senate sweep, Crystal Carey, a partner at Morgan Lewis, was confirmed as the NLRB’s general counsel.
Carey’s role holds significant sway in shaping policy through union elections and labor law prosecutions, potentially tilting the board further from recent progressive trends.
Yet, the board’s independence from White House influence is under scrutiny, especially as Trump’s firing of Wilcox stirs legal debates.
Wilcox sued Trump over her dismissal, but a recent appeals court ruling declared the law protecting board members from at-will removal unconstitutional, while the U.S. Supreme Court is set to weigh in on a similar federal agency case.
