10.14.20

Committee Report Details Years-Long Attacks on Workers’ Rights, Unions by Trump Administration’s NLRB

Over the past three and a half years, Trump’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board have waged a full-scale attack on workers’ right to organize unions and collectively bargain.

WASHINGTON – Today, the Committee on Education and Labor released a report chronicling the attacks on workers’ rights and unions by the Trump administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  The report compiles years of Committee oversight and details how the NLRB, the federal agency charged with protecting most private sector workers’ right to organize, has been plagued by corruption, conflicts, and crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that far too many workers do not have access to basic workplace safety protections, health care, or paid leave.  While unions strengthen workers’ power to bargain for these basic rights, the NLRB has only made it harder for workers to organize during the pandemic by suspending union elections and thwarting workers’ ability to vote safely by using mail-in ballots. 

“Congress declared that the purpose of the NLRA is to promote the right to join a union and collectively bargain,  but—as workers around the country are organizing, protesting, and going on strike for issues as basic as safety protections from COVID-19—the NLRB is negligent, and at times openly hostile to these rights, during a crisis where they are especially needed,” said Chairman Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (VA-03). “The Committee will continue to conduct vigorous oversight of the Trump NLRB and require the NLRB to face the public accountability it has worked so hard to avoid." 

The report comes one month after the Committee subpoenaed the NLRB for internal ethics memos and other documents related to Members’ participation in major NLRB actions where they may have conflicts of interest. 

To read the full report, please click here

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