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national labor relations board
Trump Is Rolling Back So Many Workers' Rights, He's Placed the US on a Watchlist
The inclusion of the United States on the International Trade Union Confederation's Watchlist serves as a troubling indicator of the country’s current state of affairs.
Jul 29, 2026
For generations, the United States has been a global advocate for freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. Today, however, the world is calling on the United States to uphold those same principles at home.
Last month, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), representing over 200 million workers through 340 national affiliates in 169 countries, ranked the United States among countries with “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC’s Global Rights Index assesses over 150 countries based on 97 indicators drawn from international standards and jurisprudence.
Given the measurable increase in violations since last year, the United States was also placed on the report’s “Watchlist,” alongside Guinea-Bissau, Israel, Liberia, Moldova, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe.
The inclusion of the United States on the ITUC’s Watchlist is based on the pattern of backsliding of fundamental rights over the past year and serves as a troubling indicator of the country’s current state of affairs. The report notes that, in the United States:
- More than 1 million federal workers have lost their right to collective bargaining.
- The National Labor Relations Board has been left unable to fulfill its essential role of protecting workers’ rights.
- Tens of thousands of immigrant union members have been stripped of their status and rights through the unlawful termination of various forms of rights-based protections and programs.
- Immigration enforcement is being used as a tool to suppress the exercise of freedom of expression, assembly, and association by detaining or revoking the visas of workers who take action or express views contrary to that of the government.
These actions by the Trump administration are intended to undermine workers’ rights to join a union, bargain collectively, and speak freely, but their impacts extend far beyond the workplace.
When workers exercise their rights at work, they are not only better equipped to advocate for better working conditions, they are also better able to engage democratically in their communities. It is often through a union at work that people first vote and run in elections. Currently, there are 564 union and household members who are endorsed to run for office in the midterm elections in the United States, a number that is expected to rise as the elections draw close later this year.
The actions taken by the Trump administration therefore not only threaten working conditions across the country but also debilitate people’s ability to civically engage. As a result, communities will be less prepared to resist other issues they face like corruption, abusive use of technology, and corporate greed.
The weakening of rights in the United States set a dangerous precedent for the world. Governments, employers, and investors across the world are observing and some will feel encouraged to follow.
The good news is that this story is not over.
Across the United States, workers continue to organize. They continue to win union recognition, negotiate better conditions, and build power across industries and communities. Their determination reminds the world that democracy is not sustained by institutions alone, it depends on people who are prepared to defend it every day.
When American workers fight back for their rights, they strengthen democracy not only at home, but around the world.
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Trump Labor Official Who Used to Represent Amazon Is About to Give the Company a Huge Gift
Crystal Carey, general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board, represented Amazon during her time at one of the biggest management-side law firms in the country.
Apr 13, 2026
National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Crystal Carey proposed a settlement on Sunday that would unwind a major case against the e-commerce behemoth Amazon—a company that Carey represented when she worked in the private sector for corporate clients.
Carey, whom President Donald Trump nominated after firing the Biden-era NLRB general counsel last year, sent her proposed settlement terms to the judge overseeing the labor agency's case against Amazon, which originated in the final year of the Biden administration. According to Bloomberg, Carey proposed that Amazon provide two weeks' worth of pay to dozens of drivers who were previously employed by Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS), formerly one of Amazon's delivery service partners (DSPs).
Amazon, in turn, would not be required to admit to unfair labor practices or be "found liable as a joint employer." The Biden-era NLRB argued that Amazon was a joint employer of the BTS delivery drivers and thus required to recognize and collectively bargain with their union—something Amazon has refused to do.
Bloomberg noted that, if decided against Amazon, the case Carey wants to settle "could have led for the first time to an agency judge, the NLRB members in Washington, and, eventually, federal appeals court judges ruling that Amazon was the joint employer of drivers for one of its delivery service partners."
"Amazon contracts with thousands of such partners to manage hundreds of thousands of delivery workers," Bloomberg observed.
Before Trump nominated her to replace labor champion Jennifer Abruzzo as general counsel of the NLRB, Carey was a partner at Morgan Lewis, one of the biggest management-side law firms in the country. The Economic Policy Institute noted following Carey's Senate confirmation last year that Morgan Lewis "represents corporations known for violating workers’ rights, including Amazon, SpaceX, Apple, and Tesla."
"Morgan Lewis is also pursuing the legal challenge that the NLRB is unconstitutional, despite several former NLRB members being employed at the firm," EPI noted. (Amazon has also argued in court that the labor board is unconstitutional.)
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund, and the company's founder, mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, attended the inauguration ceremony alongside other big-name tech executives.
Despite her ties to Amazon via her tenure at Morgan Lewis, Carey argued that she was not required to recuse herself from the case she's working to settle. According to Bloomberg, Carey said in an interview that "because a year had passed since she herself represented Amazon and because Morgan Lewis wasn’t representing the company in the [ongoing joint employer] case, she didn’t need to recuse herself."
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Trump's Revived Anti-Worker Rules Condemned as 'Outright Grift'
"Every day, little by little, the Trump administration is rigging the system to benefit giant corporations and shortchange workers," said one senator.
Feb 26, 2026
President Donald Trump's "barrage of attacks on workers" continued on Thursday with announcements about two key labor rules.
The US Department of Labor (DOL) proposed an independent contractor rule that the National Employment Law Project (NELP) called "yet another example of the administration siding with major corporations and stacking the deck against working people" by "effectively allowing employers to strip workers of federal minimum wage and overtime protections."
The DOL's Wage and Hour Division proposal would replace the Biden administration's widely celebrated 2024 policy for when employers can treat workers as independent contractors under the Fair Labor Standards Act with business-friendly guidance that resembles a rule adopted just before the end of Trump's first term.
"This rule will have profound real-world consequences for working people," warned NELP. "Misclassification is common in many labor-intensive, poorly paid jobs—jobs like home healthcare, janitorial work, landscaping, personal services, and increasingly, app-dispatched ride-hail and delivery—where people of color and immigrants are overrepresented, and workers lack the bargaining power to negotiate higher wages and better working conditions."
NELP pointed to research showing that low-paid independent contractors "lag behind their employee counterparts," and some "do not even earn the federal minimum wage." The organization stressed that "this rule threatens to enshrine a two-tiered labor system where similarly situated workers receive vastly different rights and protections based on the classification chosen by the business employing them."
The new rule—which now faces a 60-day public comment period—focuses on two "core factors" to determine an employee's classification: the nature and degree of control over the work, and the worker's opportunity for profit or loss based on initiative or investment.
NELP argued that "by elevating two factors above other equally important factors, the Trump administration's test fails to account for the economic realities of many working relationships. Many workers labeled as independent contractors are not really in business for themselves because they are integrated into the operations of a larger business structure that sets most of the terms of the work."
"In app-dispatched ride-hail and delivery jobs, for example, corporations like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Amazon use apps and algorithms to offer shifts or assignments to so-called independent contractors doing the core work of the business, set the wages these workers receive, surveil and assess their performance, and determine if they are offered future assignments or get 'deactivated,'" the group noted. "App-based ride-hail and delivery workers perform difficult and dangerous work without basic employment protections like the right to minimum wage and overtime, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance."
As NELP and other critics sounded the alarm over the DOL proposal on Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) also revived an effort from Trump's first term, reinstating that administration's 2020 rule on joint employers.
During Trump's initial administration, the NLRB required joint employers to "possess and exercise substantial direct and immediate control" over at least one aspect of the workers' employment. In 2023, under former President Joe Biden, the board decided that two or more entities could be considered joint employers if they had an employment relationship with the workers and helped to determine their terms and conditions of employment. However, the latter was blocked by a Trump-appointed judge the next year.
Unlike the DOL proposal, the board's rule is final. The NLRB—which has two Trump appointees, one Biden appointee, and two vacancies—said in the Federal Register that "the 2023 rule was vacated by the district court, and the action the board takes today merely implements the court's decision. Our action is ministerial and therefore will have no separate economic effect."
US Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, declared in a Thursday statement that "every day, little by little, the Trump administration is rigging the system to benefit giant corporations and shortchange workers—it's an outright grift and working people should be furious."
"The joint employer rule is nothing more than a return to Trump's anti-worker policies that let giant corporations skirt their basic obligations to employees—Trump is giving the biggest corporations cover to deny workers their ability to band together for better wages and working conditions and leaving millions of workers in the lurch, vulnerable to egregious violations of their rights," she said.
"At the same time, today, the Trump administration announced they're working to rescind the independent contractor rule," Murray continued. "Trump wants to let giant corporations classify workers as contractors so that they don't have to pay them minimum wage and overtime—these workers deserve fair pay."
The senator then took aim at the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act that congressional Republicans passed and the president signed last summer, saying that "under the Trump administration, giant corporations get giant tax breaks paid for by cutting Medicaid—the healthcare that the poorest workers are forced to rely on."
"Now, Trump wants those same corporations off the hook for every benefit, protection, and dollar they'd otherwise owe to millions of workers—it's a shakedown," she asserted. "Republicans are proving time and again, they don't care about workers—they don't want to even let workers have crumbs, but billionaires can get trillions in tax breaks that will blow up our national debt."
Murray isn't up for reelection in November's closely watched midterms, but could lead the Senate Appropriations Committee if Democrats reclaim the chamber. On Thursday, she vowed that "I am going to keep fighting for laws on the books that protect workers and build an economy that grows the middle-class, not just profit margins for the largest corporations on Earth."
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31,000 Kaiser Nurses Strike as Their Union Says Employer Puts 'Profit Over Patients'
The head of the striking nurses' union says Kaiser Permanente would "rather protect an enormous financial cushion than protect patients and the people who care for them."
Jan 26, 2026
More than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses and other healthcare professionals walked off the job Monday in two western states, accusing their employer of caring more about profits than patients and highlighting what they say are KP's unfair labor practices.
United Nurses Associations of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP)—a member of the Alliance of Healthcare Unions (AHCU)—said that 31,000 frontline registered nurses and other medical workers at more than two dozen KP hospitals and hundreds of clinics in California and Hawaii went on an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike that would continue indefinitely until they get a fair contract.
"On the picket lines, healthcare workers will call attention to what’s at stake in settling a fair contract: the growing crisis caused by Kaiser’s failure to invest in safe staffing levels, timely access to quality care, and fair wages for frontline caregivers," UNAC/UHCP said in a statement Monday.
Registered nurse and UNAC/UHCP president Charmaine Morales said: “We’re not going on strike to make noise. We’re striking because Kaiser has committed serious unfair labor practices and because Kaiser refuses to bargain in good faith over staffing that protects patients, workload standards that stop moral injury, and the respect and dignity that Kaiser caregivers have been denied for far too long."
“Striking is the lawful power of working people, and we are prepared to use it on behalf of our profession and patients," Morales added.
ON STRIKE: The UNAC/UHCP Unfair Labor Practice strike starts TODAY! 31,000+ Kaiser Permanente nurses and health care workers in CA and Hawai'i are holding the line for quality patient care and a fair contract! #TogetherWeWin #SafeStaffingSavesLives #PatientsOverProfits
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— AFSCME (@afscme.bsky.social) January 26, 2026 at 9:57 AM
The new strike follows last October's walk-off by over 75,000 nurses and allied healthcare workers at KP facilities in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii over stalled contract negotiations and other issues including pay, staffing levels, and working conditions.
UNAC/UHCP had been negotiating with KP since last May. After KP management left the bargaining table last month, the union filed an unfair labor practices complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, which has cited KP for numerous violations in recent years.
KP is the nation's largest integrated managed care consortium of nonprofit and for-profit entities. According to a 2025 investigation by Matthew Cunningham-Cook for the Center for Media and Democracy in conjunction with the American Prospect, KP "is sitting on $67.4 billion in reserves, up from $40 billion just four years ago."
Kaiser collected $12.9 billion in net income in 2024 and $7.9 billion through the third quarter of 2025.
A new UNAC/UHCP report, "Profits Over Patients," details how KP "has strayed from its founding mission and moved towards profit, expansion, and Wall Street-style asset accumulation that has created real consequences for patient care and caregiver well-being."
Morales said that “when Kaiser says it doesn’t have resources to fix staffing, what we hear is that a nonprofit health care organization would rather protect an enormous financial cushion than protect patients and the people who care for them."
UFW in solidarity with the 31,000 nurses and health care workers who are on strike in California and Hawaii.#UnionStrong #1U
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— United Farm Workers (@ufw.bsky.social) January 26, 2026 at 10:47 AM
Zach Pritchett, an emergency room nurse at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Los Angeles, told LA Progressive, “I see the end result of the poor staffing every single day."
“What I’m seeing in the ER are Kaiser members who can’t get appointments for months at a time with their own primary care physicians—so they wind up here," he added.
Some strikers drew attention to the killing by Trump administration immigration enforcers of intensive care registered nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday.
"He is one of us." "He was trying to help a woman stand up and he was assassinated. He did what nurses do, take care of others." "There's so many people here that will do the same."
Kaiser nurses on strike in California speak against ICE murder of nurse Alex Pretti pic.twitter.com/2k54Ojuqn9
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) January 26, 2026
KP responded to the new strike in a statement declaring, "Our focus remains on reaching agreements that recognize the vital contributions of our employees while ensuring high-quality, affordable care."
"We have proposed 21.5% wage increases—our strongest national bargaining offer ever—and we are prepared to close agreements at local tables now," it addded. "Employees deserve their raises, and patients deserve our full attention, not prolonged disputes."
On a picket line outside KP's Oakland Medical Center, San Francisco nurse anesthetist Jessica Servin told KQED that “we’re fighting for our livelihoods, we’re fighting for patient care."
“I believed their values and their mission statement,” Servin said of KP, where she's worked for 20 years. “It feels like they’re deviating from the foundation of why Kaiser was built. It feels kind of sad to be here and realize that Kaiser is choosing profit over patients.”
National figures supporting the strike include Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who posted on Bluesky, "I stand in solidarity with the more than 31,000 Kaiser nurses and healthcare workers on strike in California and Hawaii."
"It’s well past time for Kaiser to return to the table with a fair offer for their workers that includes safer staffing ratios and higher wages," he added.
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Help Protect Federal Workers From Trump's Union-Busting Attacks
Only months after courting union voters with pro-worker campaign rhetoric, President Trump is on track to become the most anti-union president in modern American history.
Oct 05, 2025
During a 2024 campaign stop in Detroit, President Donald Trump energized the crowd by proclaiming: “I will protect what is ours. I will protect our workers. I will protect our jobs.” Then, asking the audience to look around at empty buildings and remember how they’ve been ripped off, Trump continued, “These pro-worker policies are among the many reasons I’ve been overwhelmingly endorsed by the rank-and-file membership of the Teamsters.”
Only months after courting union voters with pro-worker campaign rhetoric, President Trump is on track to become the most anti-union president in modern American history.
The President’s record is clear: Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, Neil Gorsuch, cast the deciding vote in Janus v AFSCME, a “right-to-work” ruling Trump praised for allowing workers to opt out of union dues while freeriding off the benefits of collective bargaining provided by dues-paying members. The president’s two labor secretaries, Eugene Scalia and Lori Chavez-DeRemer, have vigorously peeled away protective regulations for workers. And following the unprecedented firing without cause of Gwen Wilcox, a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that addresses unfair labor practices and safeguards workers’ rights remains paralyzed by its inability to reach a quorum.
But what sets President Trump apart is his targeting of public sector unions.
In early April, Representatives Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Ryan Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced bipartisan legislation, “The Protect America’s Workforce Act” (H.R. 2250), to overturn Trump’s executive order and restore all terminated collective bargaining agreements.
During his first term, President Trump issued executive orders targeting federal employee unions, aimed at “weakening their ability to bargain contracts and curtailing the amount of time union representatives can spend helping members with their complaints,” according to Andrea Hsu of NPR’s "Morning Edition." Union officials complained that their ability to file grievances was almost nonexistent.
The president then kicked off his second term with an anti-union executive order, called “Restoring Accountability to Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce,” that allows the reclassification of as many as 10,000 workers, making them at-will employees and stripping union protections. But to this point, no traditional “Schedule F” employees have been reclassified.
Perhaps that’s because President Trump has found an easier path to union busting.
In March, the President cited national security concerns as he directed 22 federal agencies to disregard collective bargaining contracts covering 950,000 federal employees. In late August, he signed a second order “stripping union rights” from 440,000 “employees at six additional agencies,” according to the New York Times. These employees represent the overwhelming majority of unionized federal workers.
Public sector unions have been a bulwark against declining labor power over the past half-century. While private sector unionization has withered to 5.9% (from 35% in the 1950s), unions still represent 32.2% of public employees, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report. But in only a few months, President Trump has removed union protections from more than a million federal workers, representing over 15% of the 7 million public-sector union members nationwide.
If the president’s moves survive legal challenges, he will be the single biggest union buster in American history, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute.
But there is hope.
In early April, Representatives Jared Golden (D-Maine) and Ryan Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) introduced bipartisan legislation, “The Protect America’s Workforce Act” (H.R. 2250), to overturn Trump’s executive order and restore all terminated collective bargaining agreements. A companion bill that includes a repeal of the most recent executive order has since been introduced in the Senate.
The bill’s authors need 218 signatures to force a vote against the will of House leadership. As of September 17, it has 216 signatures, including 213 Democrats and 3 Republicans, according to the American Federation of Government Employees.
If passed in the House and Senate, the bill becomes law and overrides Trump’s union-busting executive orders, even if the courts uphold them. The president could then sign the bill into law or veto it and send the legislation back to Congress where an override requires a two-thirds majority in each chamber.
In either case, it remains possible to protect the collective bargaining rights of federal employees. So, call your representatives. Flood their inboxes. Let them know that we intend to stand up for our federal civil servants.
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Teamsters Rally in NYC After Amazon's 'Illegal' Firing of 150 Unionized Drivers
"Amazon would be nothing without its workers," said one worker. "We're the ones who power their profits. We're the ones who put our health and safety on the line every single day."
Sep 09, 2025
Teamsters and their supporters rallied outside a New York Amazon facility Monday in protest of what they said was an "illegal" firing of over 150 unionized drivers.
According to the union, the fired workers were employed by the delivery service provider Cornucopia, one of thousands of providers the company contracts with to deliver packages. These workers joined the Teamsters last year as the union went on strike in nine cities across the US.
Amazon claims these workers are not employees, but "contractors," and that firing them does not constitute illegal union busting.
The union, however, described this as "a phony shell game," saying that the contractors "wear Amazon uniforms, follow Amazon rules, and work off Amazon's routing software."
"Amazon calls the shots," read a statement from the union. "They are the employer and everyone knows it."
Last year, a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) official in Los Angeles agreed that the company had engaged in unfair labor practices when it fired other unionized contractors in California, and determined that they did, in fact, count as employees of Amazon.
At the time, this ruling seemed to provide some clarity as Amazon workers fought to have their union recognized by the company, which has refused to recognize them for years.
This remained the case even after 2024, when more than 10,000 Amazon workers joined the Teamsters and the union launched the largest strike ever against the company right before the holidays, during which they demanded the company negotiate a fair contract that included wage increases and addressed workplace safety issues and illegal union busting.
Outside Amazon's DBK4 facility, which joined the strike last year, the Teamsters and their allies renewed calls for negotiation Monday.
"Amazon is breaking the law and we let the public know it," said Antonio Rosario, a Local 804 member and Teamster organizer.
Latrice Shadae Johnson, a Teamster who works at DBK4, added that "Amazon would be nothing without its workers."
"We're the ones who power their profits. We're the ones who put our health and safety on the line every single day. We're the ones who made them a $2 trillion corporation," said Johnson. "If Amazon thinks we're going to take this lying down, they have another thing coming. Our solidarity is only growing stronger."
That solidarity has come from many corners across New York City, with members of the City Central Labor Council, part of the AFL-CIO, taking part in the rally.
The Teamsters were also joined by democratic socialist state Sen. Kristen Gonzalez (D-59), who defeated the industry-backed cousin of former Queens US Rep. Joe Crowley in 2022.
"I've been in office three years, and every single year I've been right here in this spot because every single year Amazon has done union-busting," Gonzalez said to cheers from the crowd, "It's because they think they are above the law."
In 2024, Amazon joined a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's company SpaceX, arguing that the NLRB, which is responsible for adjudicating labor rights violations, is unconstitutional because its members cannot be fired at will by the US President.
Just one week into his term, President Donald Trump fired NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, effectively crippling the board's ability to rule on union-busting cases.
According to LaborLab, which publishes reports on corporate union busting, "Without a functioning board, companies like Amazon and Tesla can engage in union-busting tactics with impunity, facing no legal consequences for violating workers' rights."
The progressive state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, currently the frontrunner to be New York City's next mayor, brought national attention to the Teamsters' plight on Monday.
"One of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world is firing unionized drivers in Queens," Mamdani wrote on X. "Solidarity with the Teamsters who rallied today against these unjust layoffs and to demand good faith negotiations."
Several Democratic members of the House of Representatives from New York, including Jerry Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, issued their own statements of solidarity, as did Republican Mike Lawler.
"Any company that denies workers the right to choose [collective] bargaining rights, including Amazon, should be confronted," Lawler said. "Unions are the backbone of this country. They helped build this country. And they damn well will ensure we have a strong and secure country moving forward."
Nadler added that he stood "with Amazon Teamsters as they rally in Queens today to hold Amazon accountable for its unlawful anti-union activity."
"Amazon," he said, "stop union busting and start bargaining a fair contract now!"
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'Brazenly Anti-Worker': Labor Day Reports Highlight Trump Attacks on Unions
"This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires," said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler.
Sep 01, 2025
Although US President Donald Trump's administration likes to boast that he puts "American workers first," several news reports published on Monday document the president's attacks on the rights of working people and labor unions.
As longtime labor reporter Steven Greenhouse explained in The Guardian, Trump throughout his second term has "taken dozens of actions that hurt workers, often by cutting their pay or making their jobs more dangerous."
Among other things, Greenhouse cited Trump's decision to halt a regulation intended to protect coal miners from lung disease, as well as his decision to strip a million federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, told Greenhouse that Trump's actions amount to a "big betrayal" of his promises to look out for US workers during the 2024 presidential campaign.
"His attacks on unions are coming fast and furious," she said. "He talks a good game of being for working people, but he's doing the absolute opposite. This is a government that is by, and for, the CEOs and billionaires."
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, similarly told Greenhouse that Trump has been "absolutely, brazenly anti-worker," and she cited him ripping away an increase in the minimum wage for federal contractors that had been enacted by former President Joe Biden as a prime example.
"The minimum wage is incredibly popular," she said. "He just took away the minimum wage from hundreds of thousands of workers. That blew my mind."
NPR published its own Labor Day report that zeroed in on how the president is "decimating" federal employee unions by issuing March and August executive orders stripping them of the power to collectively bargain for better working conditions.
So far, nine federal agencies have canceled their union contracts as a result of the orders, which are based on a provision in federal law that gives the president the power to terminate collective bargaining at agencies that are primarily involved with national security.
The Trump administration has embraced a maximalist interpretation of this power and has demanded the end of collective bargaining at departments that aren't primarily known as national security agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Weather Service.
However, Trump's attacks on organized labor haven't completely intimidated government workers from joining unions. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Trump administration's cuts to the National Park Service earlier this year inspired hundreds of workers at the California-based Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon national parks to unionize.
Although labor organizers had been trying unsuccessfully for years to get park workers to sign on, that changed when the Trump administration took a hatchet to parks' budgets and enacted mass layoffs.
"More than 97% of employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks who cast ballots voted to unionize, with results certified last week," wrote the Los Angeles Times. "More than 600 staffers—including interpretive park rangers, biologists, firefighters, and fee collectors—are now represented by the National Federation of Federal Employees."
Even so, many workers who succeed in forming unions may no longer get their grievances heard given the state of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
As documented by Timothy Noah in The New Republic, the NLRB is now "hanging by a thread" in the wake of a court ruling that declared the board's structure to be unconstitutional because it barred the president from being able to fire NLRB administrative judges at will.
"The ruling doesn't shut down the NLRB entirely because it applies only to cases in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, where the 5th Circuit has jurisdiction," Noah explained. "But Jennifer Abruzzo, who was President Joe Biden's NLRB general counsel, told me that the decision will 'open the floodgates for employers to forum-shop and seek to get injunctions' in those three states."
Noah noted that this lawsuit was brought in part by SpaceX owner and one-time Trump ally Elon Musk, and he accused the Trump NLRB of waging a "half-hearted" fight against Musk's attack on workers' rights.
Thanks to Trump and Musk's actions, Noah concluded, American oligarchs "can toast the NLRB's imminent destruction."
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'What Oligarchy Looks Like!' Sanders Blasts Anti-Worker SpaceX Ruling
Sanders charged that the ruling gave "Elon Musk... and other union busters the absolute power to exploit workers and violate labor law with impunity."
Aug 21, 2025
US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday evening warned that a ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down a law that shielded National Labor Relations Board judges from being fired at will by the White House, would give union-busting employers yet another advantage in a legal system that is already stacked in their favor.
As Reuters reported, the appeals court ruled that protections for administrative judges at the board were unconstitutional impediments to the president's ability to run the executive branch as he sees fit.
"This is what oligarchy looks like," Sanders wrote in a post on X. "Today, two Trump judges ruled that the NLRB's structure is unconstitutional giving [SpaceX CEO] Elon Musk, worth $410 billion, and other union busters the absolute power to exploit workers and violate labor law with impunity. This disastrous decision cannot stand."
Circuit Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, wrote that "because the executive power remains solely vested in the president, those who exercise it on his behalf must remain subject to his oversight," meaning that the president should have more power to dismiss judges.
As a result of the ruling, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cases against SpaceX, pipeline operator Energy Transfer, and social services search engine Aunt Bertha have for now been put on hold, although NLRB is expected to appeal the ruling.
California-based law firm CDF Labor Law explained that, under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the president could only fire NLRB board members for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office," and could only remove NLRB administrative judges for "good cause" after undergoing a hearing conducted by a separate agency.
New York-based labor attorney Benjamin Dictor warned that this ruling could ultimately leave the US labor movement with little recourse when employers violate workers' rights.
"Right now, the NLRB is the only federal body that investigates unfair labor practices, certifies unions, and compels bargaining. If it's defunct, there is no backup system," wrote Dictor. "That means workers fired for union activity? No remedy. Employers refusing to bargain? No consequences. Organizing elections? Suspended indefinitely."
If federal courts eventually rule that the NLRB is unconstitutional, he added, "it won't just be a US labor crisis. It could put the US out of compliance with its obligations under international law."
He then explained that the US has obligations as a member of the International Labor Organization (ILO) and that gutting NLRB would throw international labor standards into chaos.
"In ILO terms, that's the US failing to ensure even basic compliance with freedom of association and collective bargaining standards," he said. "It's not just a domestic constitutional question. It's the US signaling to the world that workers' rights are optional—and that's exactly what the ILO was created to prevent... The stakes are global."
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How the Right-Wing Supreme Court Uses the Shadow Docket to Boost Trump’s Agenda
Although the Supreme Court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals, emergency requests in high-profile cases proliferated during Trump’s first term and continue in his second.
Jun 04, 2025
In an unsigned two-page decision (Trump v. Wilcox) released on May 22, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s move to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board without cause and in the middle of their designated terms. The decision reversed two separate judgments issued by two different D.C. District Court judges that had blocked the firings as unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was issued on an expedited basis as part of a rapidly expanding and highly controversial set of truncated decisions known as the “shadow docket,” a term coined by University of Chicago professor William Baude in a 2015 law review article to describe emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and that are typically resolved without complete briefing, oral arguments, or detailed opinions. Although shadow-docket rulings are frequently used to lift, or “stay,” lower-court injunctions while further litigation continues, they often have the same practical effect as final decisions.
The two officials involved in the Wilcox case, Gwynne Wilcox of the NLRB and Cathy Harris of the MSPB, were nominated to their positions by President Joe Biden and were confirmed by the Senate. Before their dismissals, they were set to serve fixed terms, with Wilcox’s tenure expiring in 2028 and Harris’ in 2029.
Kagan is not alone in her critique that the shadow docket undermines precedent and lacks transparency.
The NLRB’s five-member governing board is charged with enforcing U.S. labor law and collective bargaining, and adjudicating alleged unfair labor practices. The MSPB has a three-member board and adjudicates federal employee challenges to adverse employment actions. Both agencies were established by Congress to operate as independent, nonpartisan overseers free from presidential interference.
President Donald Trump has long railed against agency independence. In a 2019 speech at Turning Point USA’s Teen Action Summit, he declared, “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” referring to the second article of the Constitution and the “unitary executive” theory, which contends that all executive power is concentrated in the president. Trump is also a proponent of the goal of “deconstructing the administrative state,” a phrase popularized by Steve Bannon and more recently promoted by Project 2025.
Sensing an opportunity to strike, Trump fired Wilcox, a career labor attorney, on January 27, a week after his second inauguration. Harris was sent packing a month later. The lower-court orders mandating their reinstatements were issued in March. But on April 9, Trump’s solicitor general and former criminal defense attorney D. John Sauer requested the Supreme Court to intervene and put the district-court judgments on hold, allowing the dismissals to take effect while returning the cases to the district courts and the Court of Appeals for additional hearings, a process that could easily take more than a year.
In his petition to the Supreme Court, Sauer implored the justices to disregard the court’s 1935 precedent decision in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which held that Congress has the constitutional power to enact laws limiting the president’s authority to fire executive officers of independent agencies that exercise quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial functions. Sauer asked the justices to put the lower-court reinstatement orders on hold or, alternatively, issue a final decision on the merits, endorsing the administration’s actions.
Although the firings of Wilcox and Harris clearly ran afoul of Humphrey’s, the Supreme Court granted a stay, and both women were sacked. Just as shocking, the court did so without hearing oral arguments, and without citing Humphrey’s a single time in its decision.
The three Democratic-appointees on the court dissented. Writing for herself and justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan blasted her Republican colleagues for their bad faith and bias in favor of the president. “For 90 years,” she charged, “Humphrey’s Executor v. United States… has stood as a precedent of this Court. And not just any precedent. Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control.”
Quoting Alexander Hamilton, she continued, “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts, it is indispensable that they should be bound down by strict rules and precedents.” Without mentioning the shadow docket by name, she castigated the majority for rushing to judgment, “unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument—and the passage of time—needed to discipline our decision-making.”
Although the Supreme Court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals—such as last-minute requests for stays of execution in death penalty cases—emergency requests in high-profile cases proliferated during Trump’s first term, earning the shadow-docket sobriquet. According to Georgetown University law professor and shadow-docket scholar Steve Vladeck, the first Trump administration sought emergency relief 41 times, with the Supreme Court granting relief in 28 of those cases. By comparison, the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations filed a combined total of eight emergency relief requests over a 16-year period.
In December 2017, the Supreme Court issued a shadow-docket ruling allowing the third and final version of Trump’s racist Muslim travel ban to move forward pending further appeals. The court ultimately approved the ban in a 2018 merits decision. Later in Trump’s first go-round, the court used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s executive actions calling for the diversion of federal funds to construct the southern border wall, prohibiting transgender people from openly serving in the military, and restricting the ability of Central American refugees to seek political asylum.
During Biden’s presidency, the shadow docket shifted to emergency requests filed by red state governments and private parties, but the court maintained its rightward bias. Among other shadow-docket decisions, the court ended Biden’s Covid-19 eviction moratorium; permitted the new six-week Texas abortion ban to take effect (it would later approve the ban in a final decision that overturned Roe v. Wade); and reinstated a first-Trump-term policy that made it easier for companies to pursue projects that pollute U.S. waters.
Kagan is not alone in her critique that the shadow docket undermines precedent and lacks transparency. At times the criticism has become heated. In September 2021, Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer triggered an open feud with Justice Samuel Alito, penning a column that accused the court’s right-wing majority of publishing its ruling on Texas’ abortion law in the middle of the night to minimize public outcry. In response, Alito excoriated the media during an hour-long live-streamed speech delivered at Notre Dame University for portraying the court’s majority as “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its ways,” and for feeding “unprecedented efforts to intimidate the court or damage it as an independent institution.”
Fortunately, not every shadow-docket order has leaned in the direction of Trump and the MAGA movement. One notable exception was the court’s May 16 ruling that extended an earlier ban on the deportation of undocumented Venezuelan men in immigration custody in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. But even that decision ended with a note of encouragement for Trump, advising that “The Government may remove the [men]… under other lawful authorities.” There was also an impassioned 14-page dissent written by Alito and joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
On May 30, the court issued another pro-Trump shadow-docket order, allowing the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela that had been granted by the Biden administration. And in the coming weeks and months, the court can be expected to return to the shadow docket again in cases involving the deportation of undocumented migrants to South Sudan, the operations of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and possibly the legality of Trump’s tariffs.
Given the court’s overall jurisprudence, there is scant reason to be optimistic that it will openly repudiate or substantially limit the president’s authority in these or other cases critical to the nation’s future. As Elizabeth Wydra, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center, told Reuters in a 2021 interview, “What we are seeing are the consequences of a deeply conservative court, with the added travesties of the shadow docket.”
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'Legislating From the Bench,' Supreme Court Greenlights Trump Firing of Labor Regulators
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that the president believes the 90-year precedent "should be either overruled or confined... And he has chosen to act on that belief—really, to take the law into his own hands."
May 22, 2025
In a decision that alarmed legal experts, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the reinstatement of two labor regulators fired by President Donald Trump in apparent violation of federal law intended to prevent such ousters for political reasons.
The Trump administration asked the high court—which has a right-wing supermajority—to block orders from the District Court for the District of Columbia against the president's removal of Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) Member Cathy Harris and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Member Gwynne Wilcox.
An unsigned two-page opinion—from which the three liberals dissented—provides the Trump administration that relief, but the majority declined to take up the cases more fully, meaning they will play out U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Hill noted that the move "leaves both agencies without a quorum required to conduct certain business in the meantime."
In her fiery dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that "for 90 years, Humphrey's Executor v. United States... has stood as a precedent of this court. And not just any precedent. Humphrey's undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control."
While the MSPB and NLRB are the focus of this case, "there are many others," she continued. "The current president believes that Humphrey's should be either overruled or confined... And he has chosen to act on that belief—really, to take the law into his own hands."
"Our Humphrey's decision remains good law, and it forecloses both the president's firings and the court's decision to award emergency relief," Kagan added. "Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law."
Big, bad legal news from "the shadow docket." 6-3 overturning the stay in Wilcox, the NLRB case. Less than 2 pages of assertions that have been proven historically incorrect. A preview of expanding presidential power and allowing the Trump removals: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...
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— Jed H. Shugerman (@jedshug.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Slate's Mark Joseph Stern similarly stressed the significance of Thursday's development on social media, writing that "the Supreme Court just effectively overruled 90 years of precedent on the shadow docket, greenlighting Trump's firing of multimember agency leaders while their cases are pending—despite Congress' effort to protect them against removal. A huge decision."
"The Supreme Court goes out of its way to say that its order today does NOT allow Trump to remove members of the Federal Reserve because it is 'uniquely structured' and has a 'distinct history tradition,'" he noted. "I do not think those distinctions hold water."
The right-wing justices' opinion states that "Gwynne Wilcox and Cathy Harris contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee."
"We disagree," the court's majority said. "The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States."
Multiple other court watchers echoed Stern's take on social media.
They’re not only overturning precedent on the shadow docket, but ~deciding~ other cases in a non-binding (dicta) way to give cover for these actions. Today, this unnamed group of conservative justices, not even claiming this is “per curiam,” say that the Federal Reserve is different. Sure.
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— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 5:12 PM
"I don't mean to be a caricature, but this just isn't law. The Supreme Court is always making policy. But this is beyond," said Noah Rosenblum, a New York University associate law professor law, summarizing the decision. "'This dicta in an emergency order will reassure the markets but just, uh, trust us on the law here, OK, no we're not overruling Humphrey's yet, and when we do we'll spare the Fed.'"
Christine Kexel Chabot, a Marquette University associate law professor law, said: "The court is legislating from the bench: It has eliminated removal restrictions it finds unimportant while keeping those it finds too consequential to kill (the Fed). Article II provides an undifferentiated grant of 'the executive power,' not one that applies to the NLRB and excepts the Fed."
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