Editorials & Other Articles

Abruzzo, whose service as NLRB general counsel during Biden’s presidency ranks as the most brilliantly pro-worker tenure of any federal official since Sen. Robert Wagner, the NLRA’s author, has some ideas about what can be done if the NLRB remains deactivated or is abolished altogether. “States have to step in,” she told me, “if the NLRB is no longer functioning.” Already, some states have enacted laws banning employers from compelling their employees to listen to anti-union propaganda. Many have extended bargaining rights to workers excluded from the protections of the NLRA. But if the NLRB is no longer functioning and, for instance, can no longer hold union affiliation elections for a company’s workers, then states should consider holding such elections, she suggested. And even if the NLRA is struck down in toto, she noted, workers would still retain their fundamental right to recourse. The years immediately preceding its 1935 enactment, she recalled, were filled with boycotts, strikes, and even general strikes that closed cities down. Workers will “still have the power to withhold their labor,” she said.