On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate confirmed Marvin Kaplan, a former Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission lawyer, to fill one of the two open seats on the National Labor Relations Board, moving the agency a step closer to a Republican majority. Kaplan was confirmed on a 50-48 party-line vote by the GOP-controlled Senate.
The Senate has yet to schedule a vote for President Trump’s second nominee for the Board, William Emanuel, a long time management-side labor and employment lawyer. The Senate is expected to vote for cloture on Emanuel’s nomination after the August recess. The cloture vote kicks off a 30-hour period of debate. A final confirmation vote will then be scheduled.
The delay in moving forward on Emanuel’s nomination is the result of several Democrats stalling by raising partisan concerns that Emanuel’s history as a management-side lawyer somehow creates a conflict of interest, notwithstanding their prior support of Board nominees who have had lifelong careers as attorneys for unions, and indeed in numerous other instances, attorneys who represented employers. For example, current Member Mark Gaston Peace was longtime union lawyer and the current NLRB General Counsel Richard Griffin, Jr. was the General Counsel of the International Union of the Operating Engineers and a member of the board of directors of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.
Emanuel is expected to be confirmed in September despite the delays.
As discussed in our earlier advisory, if the nomination of Emanuel is confirmed by the Senate, which seems likely as of now, the NLRB will not only have its first Republican majority in nine years, it will return to full strength at five members. As cases come before the Board for its consideration, the NLRB will likely reconsider many of the decisions of the Democratic majority Obama Board. However, as we have noted, NLRB General Counsel is expected to serve out his four year term and remain in that critical post, in which he decides in many respects, which issues are litigated and presented to the Board, through November 3, 2017.
As we noted in our earlier blog, the Board is likely to consider a number of significant legal issues once the final vacancy is filled, including the NLRB’s standards for determining whether joint employer relationships exist, the standards for evaluating whether handbooks and work rules unlawfully interfere with employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”), the Board’s standards for determining what are appropriate units for collective bargaining including a review of the so-called “mircro-units” approved by the Obama Board, the status graduate students and research assistants as employees under the NLRA with the right to collective bargaining, and a host of other decisions from the past eight years that more expansively interpreted the NLRA.
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