WASHINGTON—By a 53-43 party-line vote, among a mass of Trump nominees the Senate approved Crystal Carey as the new General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, making a top union-buster the board’s chief enforcement officer and de facto chief of staff.
The same vote also filled two board seats, assuring that for the first time in almost a year, the board will have a quorum and can issue decisions on union elections and worker-boss conflicts. That won’t be good for workers: Both are Republicans. Two other board seats are unfilled.
The sole current board member is Democrat David Prouty. The Senate vote put former NLRB staffer James Murphy in one seat through December 2027. He was chief of staff to another union-buster who sat on the board, Marvin Kaplan—whose tenure was rife with conflicts of interest.
And senators approved Scott Mayer, Boeing’s chief counsel, for a term ending in December 2029. He’s been serving the aircraft and military manufacturer during two strikes by its Machinists, one in the Puget Sound area and the other around St. Louis.
The AFL-CIO and other unions opposed all three, but particularly Carey, who may be the biggest danger for workers.
Her clients at union-buster Morgan Lewis & Bockius include Amazon, Apple, SpaceX and Tesla. Elon Musk owns Tesla and SpaceX while Jeff Bezos owns Amazon. All three firms, Musk and Bezos sued in federal court in deep-red Texas charging the NLRB’s structure, and the board, are unconstitutional.
Carey, wrote Lulit Shewan of the Center for Law and Social Policy, is the lead attorney in their NLRB constitutionality challenge. They’ve won, so far.
“The NLRB General Counsel serves as the agency’s chief prosecutor and policy leader, responsible for enforcing workers’ rights” under labor law, AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director Jody Calemine explained to senators on October 9. “Crystal Carey’s record demonstrates hostility to those rights,” added Calemine. The federation also sharply criticized and opposed Mayer and Murphy.
Carey, Calemine wrote, tutored clients on how to defeat organizing drives, exploit the “independent contractor” and “joint employer” loopholes, and supports “captive audience” meetings where bosses—and union busters—can harangue, lie and threaten workers who seek to unionize.
“And during Ms. Carey’s hearing she also refused to affirm the constitutionality of the very agency she seeks to lead, saying only ‘the courts will decide,’” Calemine added.
Meanwhile, the effort of Democratic NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox, its first-ever African-American woman member and female board chair, to reclaim her seat even though Trump illegally fired her, appears to have come to an end.
Trump fired Wilcox in January, in defiance of labor law which says board members can be removed only for cause. Wilcox is a former counsel for the Service Employees, and Trump fired her, he said, because she didn’t vote a pro-corporate line. Her term ran through August 2028.
Wilcox sued and won in lower courts, but ultimately lost at the U.S. Supreme Court. There, Chief Justice John Roberts stopped her from returning and sent the whole mess down to the federal appeals court in D.C. for a full-scale trial. In early December, she lost that, too. The board, the judges stated, is a quasi-executive agency and thus the president can remove anyone he wants anytime he wants.
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