In August of last year, I wrote a piece for the New York Times in which I argued that the Starbucks unionization campaign illustrates the inherent limitations of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in facilitating mass unionization in America. The piece analyzes how much NLRB effort was required to produce 11,000 new union members at Starbucks and then concludes that the NLRB does not have even a tiny fraction of the budget that would be required to certify millions of new union members in a short period of time.
If this is how many government resources are required to certify just over 11,000 new union members, then it would clearly be unsustainable for the government if the enthusiasm we’ve seen at Starbucks were to spread to other companies and other unions. Without reforms, a huge wave of unionization would find itself paralyzed in the bottleneck of the N.L.R.B. process.
I was reminded of this while reading the first General Counsel memorandum (“GC memo”) of the Trump administration, which I summarized at NLRB Edge yesterday. The memo, GC 25-05, rescinds a long list of Biden-era guidance and signals that the new GC is going to try to roll back various worker protections. This is fairly standard when Republicans control the NLRB.
Interestingly, Acting General Counsel William Cowen begins the memo by referencing the resource limitation problem I discussed in my New York Times Starbucks piece.
Over the past few years, our dedicated and talented staff have worked diligently to process an ever-increasing workload. Notwithstanding these efforts, we have seen our backlog of cases grow to the point where it is no longer sustainable. The unfortunate truth is that if we attempt to accomplish everything, we risk accomplishing nothing.
Cowen is right that having a huge case backlog that makes it impossible to resolve unfair labor practices quickly makes the NLRB process essentially pointless. Most workers cannot wait for years…
Auteur: Matt Bruenig
