On March 6, a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump illegally fired former National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair Gwynne Wilcox. The judge ordered that she be restored and allowed to fulfill her duties as a duly-appointed member of the NLRB. With its quorum now re-established, the NLRB can resume its mission enforcing workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). President Trump has opposed this important work, as shown by his email purporting to fire Wilcox, who is the only Black woman to ever serve on the NLRB.
In his email, Trump at turns ignored and derided the agency’s work, further undercutting his claims to be pro-worker. As he admitted, his decision to remove Wilcox was because she is pro-worker, as shown in her support for a pro-worker ‘joint employer’ rule, which, as the American Civil Liberties Union has argued, is essential to holding employers accountable for their misdeeds. In his email, Trump did not mention the NLRB’s mission to safeguard workers’ right to collective action or the benefits of holding employers accountable for their treatment of workers. He expressed empathy for employers only, claiming without evidence that Wilcox’s decisions had “improperly cabined employers’ rights to speak on the subject of unionization[.]” Trump may have been alluding to the numerous unfair labor practices for which the NLRB found Tesla liable, including a threat to retaliate, which is not protected by the First Amendment, by Elon Musk when workers at Tesla began unionizing.
Though often overlooked compared to better-known rights, the NLRA-protected “right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection” are essential to the causes of racial and economic justice.
The right to engage in collective action to protest working or other conditions is a core human right. It is implicit in the First Amendment right to speech, association, and petition and is codified in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Section 7 of the NLRA. Thanks to Section 7, most private sector workers in the U.S. have the express right to organize and form unions, to bargain collectively, and to engage in other forms of collective action to improve working conditions.
While these rights benefit all workers, low-income workers – disproportionately Black and Hispanic – stand to benefit the most. Unions negotiate for higher wages, improved benefits, reduced income equality, and workplace protections, as the federal government and others have documented.
The NLRB is charged with protecting these rights, which has led in recent years to wins for low-income workers and workers of color. Specifically:
- The NLRB administered the election of Amazon warehouse workers in Staten Island, more than 60 percent of whom were Black or Latino, who voted to join the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), a culmination of the first successful organizing drive in Amazon history. The NLRB also went after Amazon after it committed numerous unfair labor practices against ALU.
- The NLRB oversaw the unionization of thousands of Starbucks employees, more than 50 percent of whom identify as a racial or ethnic minority. The NLRBhas consistently prosecuted Starbucks when it has committed unfair labor practices against those workers.
- Since 2021 petitions for union elections at the NLRB have more than doubled. Black workers have higher union membership rates than other racial and ethnic groups and, thus, are most likely to depend on the protections afforded by the NLRA.
Ultimately, if workers are to improve their lot, they must rely on each other. At their core, labor unions are vehicles for collective self-help that, when leveraged wisely, can help workers of all stripes but particularly low-income and other vulnerable workers – who alone can do little to improve their lot – effectuate their demands for better working conditions. Renowned civil rights leaders have recognized their potential. A. Phillip Randolph, who helped organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, recognized the potential of unions to help Black workers band together to oppose discrimination. Martin Luther King Jr. spent the last days of his life in Memphis in solidarity with striking sanitation workers seeking better pay and safer working conditions. Pedro Albizu Campos, famed nationalist leader of Puerto Rico, organized sugarcane workers in furtherance of this principle. Unions are a rare institution where people of all backgrounds, and across racial lines, can make common cause in furtherance of mutual aid.
"At their core, labor unions are vehicles for collective self-help that, when leveraged wisely, can help workers of all stripes but particularly low-income and other vulnerable workers..."
The NLRB’s reopening is cause for celebration and a step in the direction of economic and racial justice. Regardless of the NLRB, it’s on workers to organize to see their demands met. As former NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo (fired in the same email as Wilcox) observed in her outgoing statement: “if the Agency does not fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations.”
