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by Brandon Magner | Labor Law Lite

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act proposes to give the National Labor Relations Board a power that the Supreme Court has long deprived it of: the ability to impose fines upon employers who commit unfair labor practices as under the National Labor Relations Act. I have argued that this power—which ranges up to $100,000 per unfair labor practice for repeat offenders—would have a clear budgetary impact on the federal government, thus allowing at least this portion of the PRO Act to slip through the reconciliation process if necessary.

Today, Richard Trumka, President of the AFL-CIO, released the following statement.

When President Biden took office this year, he immediately fired National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) General Counsel Peter Robb and replaced the NLRB Chairman with Lauren McFerran. Now McFerran wants American workers to understand the most powerful tool they have: the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).

by Brandon Magner | Labor Law Lite

Very few federal judges have experience as former labor lawyers. Many scholars and activists have written about this phenomenon, and I’ve discussed it with regards to Obama’s judicial picks and Biden’s agenda. This dearth of workplace legal knowledge, especially from the union side, almost certainly has deleterious effects on workers’ rights; one prominent professor has gone so far as to suggest it’s an indirect example of class war.

by Brandon Magner | Labor Law Lite

On [a] Friday evening, Trader Joe’s employee Ben Bonnema posted on Twitter that he had been fired by the company for writing a letter addressed to the CEO which expressed concerns about the company’s pandemic-related safety precautions. Bonnema attached a copy of the letter in the tweet, and followed it up with a copy of the termination notice from Trader Joe’s, which specifically cites the letter as the basis for the decision without any other mention of potential misconduct