Democrats make last stand for unions ahead of Trump administration

In a final push to bolster union rights ahead of a Trump presidency, the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday banned employers nationwide from forcing workers to attend anti-union meetings.

Separately, Democrats are also deploying a last-ditch effort to try to get the Senate to reconfirm NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran in the last December session, allowing the agency to maintain a Democratic majority and continue its labor-friendly rulings into the next Trump administration.

These efforts could help President Joe Biden cement his legacy as the most pro-union president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and protect efforts to safeguard unionized workers in a Trump administration. But labor experts widely expect the Trump administration to swiftly undo Biden-era gains for unions.

The Biden administration "and his NLRB have been one of the most effective and aggressive in modern history at protecting workers' rights to organize," said Kate Andrias, a labor law professor at Columbia Law School. "I think that we're likely to see many of those achievements undone under the Trump administration."

The NLRB is also expected to push through a number of union-friendly decisions in the coming weeks, including cases involving workers at Amazon and in the gig economy. In a separate decision involving Starbucks baristas, the agency also ruled last week that employers cannot tell workers that unionizing will hurt their relationship with management, overturning a 1985 precedent.

Wednesday's long-awaited decision states that forcing workers to attend employer speeches on unions, known as "captive audience" meetings, is illegal because such meetings have a "tendency to interfere with and coerce employees in the exercise" of their union rights.

Such meetings, in which employers warn workers that there are risks and harms in unionizing, are a highly effective and widespread practice deployed by companies, including Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and Trader Joe's. Amazon spent more than $17 million from 2022 to 2023 on consultants hired to convince its warehouse workers against unionizing, according to federal disclosures.

"Banning captive audience meetings is incredibly significant because employers believe they work," said Sharon Block, a labor law professor at Harvard University and a former Democratic NLRB member.

Wednesday's ruling involved mandatory meetings Amazon held at a Staten Island warehouse "urging the employees to reject union representation," according to the NLRB. That warehouse became the first at the company to unionize in 2022. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.)

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The NLRB made clear in its ruling that employers may hold such meetings as long as they are notified in advance that meetings are voluntary and no attendance records are kept.

Michael Lotito, an attorney at Littler Mendelson, a firm representing employers, said that banning captive audience meetings "chills First Amendment rights" and "really means stop speaking about unions."

Meanwhile, Democrats and labor unions are pushing Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D., New York) to put NLRB chair McFerran before a vote during the lame-duck session. Labor advocates say they can secure the necessary Senate votes. But they worry that Schumer will prioritize judicial nominations over her nomination, which has been packaged with a Republican nomination. In the midst of all this, Trump allies have discussed taking the step of firing the Democratic members of the NLRB, in a challenge to legal precedent.

"If she's reconfirmed, the so-called nuclear option will be examined," said Roger King of HR Policy Association, a trade group representing human resource officers, adding that McFerran's "very extremist agenda" under the board's current top prosecutor is the "main reason for concern and opposition."

Without her renomination, Republicans stand to gain a majority next year and could immediately start reversing union-friendly rulings, including ones that makes it easier for gig workers and other low-wage workers to unionize, and another that allows the board to seek new forms of relief for workers fired for union organizing. McFerran's reconfirmation would secure a Democratic majority on the board until 2026.

Two senior White House officials told the Washington Post that they believe many of the Biden-era achievements for unions will endure into the Trump administration, including provisions in major spending bills intended to incentivize employers to hire union labor in clean energy and manufacturing. They also pointed to the administration's efforts to give millions of workers access to overtime pay and help secure union contracts with historic wage gains at the Big 3 automakers, Boeing, and others.

Biden officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the issues, said they expect many of these initiatives to remain, because undoing them could reduce pay for working-class people.

But many employers are hopeful that these efforts, especially the NLRB's labor-friendly rulings, will be reversed under Donald Trump.

"There is real pent-up anger in the management community as to how far the current NLRB has gone in changing the law," said Lotito, the Littler Mendelson attorney.

Trump won the majority of lower-income voters and gained ground with union members, despite the Biden administration's myriad gains for organized labor. That shift has Democrats, long the party aligned with the working class and unions, concerned about their political future.

Under the Biden administration, filings for union elections have doubled, but the share of American workers in unions has waned, reaching an all-time low last year. Labor experts say that while Biden's pro-union policies have invigorated unions, the vast majority of mostly nonunion working-class voters have not been directly affected by the pro-union policies.