Working people should be alarmed by the attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
As the Economic Policy Institute reports, a business group that calls itself the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi, asking her to intervene in decisions made by the NLRB under the Biden administration. In so doing, the group hopes to weaponize the executive branch and strip the NLRB of its independence. Lauren McFerran, the NLRB chair under Biden, reposted the EPI article.
It’s more than an attack just on a single agency, it’s an attack on the fundamental democratic principle of checks and balances. And working people will pay the price.
The NLRB was created as an independent agency to shield labor rights enforcement from partisan politics. But the group’s letter demands that the attorney general — and, by extension, the president — dictate how the NLRB interprets and enforces labor law.
That’s not governance. It’s political interference.
As EPI notes, “The decisions in question address important issues like which workers have the right to form and join a union and what remedies are available to workers who are illegally fired in retaliation for exercising their rights in the workplace.”
The real agenda here is clear: silence workers, disempower unions, and let corporations operate without consequence.
The NLRB decisions under attack — Stericycle, Tesla, Home Depot, Cemex, Amazon — are not radical. They are essential protections for workers facing surveillance, retaliation and intimidation.
“Ordinarily, the way employers try to get the NLRB to change a decision they disagree with is to challenge the decision on appeal,” EPI says. “Many of the decisions identified in the memo have been challenged, and those court proceedings are in progress.”
What the business group wants is for this administration to bypass that legal process.
Overruling NLRB decisions would gut the rights of people trying to organize for better wages, conditions, and dignity on the job. Politicizing the NLRB doesn’t serve democracy. It serves CEOs and billionaires.
We must not let it happen. To fight back, let’s Get Organized.