Trump’s National Anti-Labor Relations Board

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Publish Date:
July 18, 2017
Source:
The American Prospect
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Summary

In his first seven months in office, President Trump has made quick work undoing a host of Obama-era labor regulations. Now that he finally got around to making two nominations to the National Labor Relations Board, he’s beginning the pernicious, though slow-moving, assault on worker and union rights that typically plays out when the board has a Republican majority.

It’s at the NLRB, the independent agency charged with enforcing and interpreting the nation’s labor laws, where Trump will be able to most forcefully reverse President Obama’s workers’ rights legacy—a highly vulnerable legacy given that it was confined to leveraging the power of executive-branch departments and agencies.

William Gould, who served as the NLRB chairman during the Clinton administration, recently wrote a scathing op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle opposing Kaplan’s nomination.

Since the 1980s, a number of NLRB nominees by Republicans as well as Democrats have come from Capitol Hill staffs. This has promoted a trend toward the appointment of Washington insiders trading places between political staffs and Washington law firms—the insider elite, which supposedly prompted President Trump’s call to “drain the swamp.” Kaplan would constitute the Washington insider plus. His deep involvement in initiatives designed to impair the Obama NLRB have involved him directly in an unprecedented attempt to control the board through politics.

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