President Trump Appoints Philip A. Miscimarra Acting Chair of National Labor Relations Board – The Beginning of the End of the “Obama Board”

By appointing Philip Miscimarra, who has served as a Member of the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) since August 2013, to serve as Acting Chair of the agency, President Donald Trump has taken the first step in what will undoubtedly be an ongoing process to change the National Labor Relations Board. Chairman Miscimarra is the only Republican currently serving on the Board. Mark Gaston Pearce, who has served as chairman, a Democrat who has served as chairman since 2011 and as a Board Member since 2010, will continue to serve under his appointment which expires in August 2018.

Significantly, there are two vacancies on the five member Board at this time. This means that President Trump will now be able to fill the two vacant seats with Republicans, giving the Board a Republican majority.  By tradition, Presidents have filled three of the five seats on the Board with members of their own political party and two seats with members of the other party.  Thus, once the President nominates and the Senate confirms two new Board members, the Board will likely revisit many of the decisions of the past eight years, in which the Obama Board took an expansive view of the National Labor Relations Act’s (“NLRA” or the “Act”) meaning and its application to a wide range of representation and unfair labor practice law, including the Board’s expansion of its definition of joint employer status, and the Board’s recent holding that graduate students and teaching assistants are employees with the right to join and form unions, to cite but two examples.

Notably, since joining the Board in 2013, Mr. Miscimarra has frequently been in the minority, dissenting from many of the changes in the interpretation and application of the Act that came to be a hallmark of the Obama Board. Many of his dissents were from what were seen by many observers as an attempt to expand the Act’s definitions of protected activity, in the realm of employee handbooks and workplace rules, in a manner that did not reflect the real world challenges that employers face. Particularly noteworthy have been his dissents in a group of Board decisions that addressed the challenges that employers face in conducting workplace investigations and the conflicting obligations under the NLRA and other statutes.

An even more seismic change will come to the NLRB in November 2017, when the term of the Board’s General Counsel, Richard F. Griffin, Jr. expires and the new President gets to nominate his successor.