CPAW Statement Ahead of Tomorrow's House Subcommittee Hearing: "Examining the Policies and Priorities of the NLRB"
Coalition to Protect American Workers Cheers NLRB Leadership's Pro-Worker Direction — Urges Congress to Elevate the Four Issues That Matter Most
Tomorrow morning, the House Education and Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions will convene to examine the policies and priorities of the National Labor Relations Board. CPAW welcomes this hearing and looks forward to NLRB Chairman James Murphy and General Counsel Crystal Carey making the case for the pro-worker, pro-growth reform agenda that American workers have been waiting for.
The Trump NLRB has an opportunity, and a mandate, to restore what the Biden administration spent four years dismantling: a labor system built on worker choice, fair elections, due process, and constitutional balance. Chairman Murphy and General Counsel Carey are the right leaders to deliver that restoration. Tomorrow, the subcommittee should make clear which issues matter most to the workers this system is supposed to serve, and signal that Congress is watching and ready to support the work of getting them fixed.
Four Issues the Subcommittee Must Put on the Table
The Biden NLRB left a well-documented trail of damage — bypassing Congress, ignoring decades of settled precedent, and tilting the entire system away from workers and toward the political interests of union leadership. Three of the four issues on this list are direct products of that overreach. The fourth, the Faster Labor Contracts Act, is a new threat, but one that flows from the same impulse: empowering union leadership at the expense of the workers they claim to represent. The subcommittee should ensure Chairman Murphy and General Counsel Carey hear directly from Congress that addressing all four is the priority.
Cemex Bargaining Orders. The Biden NLRB's Cemex decision was among the most sweeping anti-democratic rulings in modern labor law. Under Cemex, unions can be imposed on workers without a secret-ballot election. All it takes is an unfounded allegation of employer misconduct, and the Board can certify a union without workers ever casting a vote. The Sixth Circuit has already rejected Cemex as an overreach of agency authority. The subcommittee should make clear to Chairman Murphy and General Counsel Carey that Congress wants it gone — and that the legal and political foundation to finish the job is there.
Blocking Charges. Workers who want to vote, including workers who want to leave a union that is no longer serving them, can have that process frozen indefinitely by union-filed blocking charges. The Biden administration reinstated and expanded this tool through the Fair Choice-Employee Voice Final Rule, giving union leadership the power to delay or prevent elections while investigations drag on for months or years. The subcommittee should press for a clear commitment from NLRB leadership: workers will not have to wait years to exercise their most fundamental right in this system — the right to vote.
Employer Meetings on Unionization. The Biden NLRB's 2024 decision in Amazon.com Services LLC overturned 75 years of settled precedent by effectively banning employers from holding informational meetings with employees about unionization, while union organizers faced no equivalent restriction and could communicate freely at any time. Workers facing one of the most consequential decisions of their working lives deserve to hear from both sides. The subcommittee should signal its full support for restoring that right and ask NLRB leadership where things stand.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act. With a House floor vote now imminent after the discharge petition crossed 218 signatures, the subcommittee should also make clear to NLRB leadership what the FLCA would mean for the reforms they are working to advance. Under the FLCA, if parties haven't reached a first contract within 90 days, a federally appointed arbitrator steps in and imposes a binding two-year agreement with no ratification vote from the workers it covers, no required industry expertise, and no accountability to the people who will live under it. The same union leadership funneling member dues into Democratic campaigns, the CWA, SEIU, and AFL-CIO directed virtually every dollar of their combined $59 million in 2024 independent expenditures to Democrats, is now pushing a law that lets government arbitrators lock in the political contract provisions workers would have voted down themselves. The FLCA doesn't solve the problem of delayed first contracts. It hands politically motivated union leadership a shortcut around the workers they claim to represent. Congress should reject it, and the subcommittee should make that case tomorrow.
Chairman Murphy and General Counsel Carey are doing the hard work of restoring a system that was badly abused. The subcommittee has a clear role to play tomorrow: put these four issues front and center, signal that Congress sees the work being done and supports it, and make clear that finishing the job on Biden-era overreach is the mandate workers gave this administration.
American workers have waited long enough for a labor system that puts them first. Tomorrow is a chance to make sure the people in charge of delivering it know exactly where Congress stands.