According to news reports, the Trump administration has submitted Marvin Kaplan and William Emanuel for FBI background checks, and it plans to nominate them by June to fill a pair of vacancies at the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”).
The administration hopes to have the new members confirmed by the Senate before the August recess.
Kaplan is currently counsel to the commissioner of the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission. He previously served as the Republican workforce policy counsel for the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
Emanuel is a shareholder at the management firm Littler Mendelson PC in Los Angeles. He has represented business groups seeking to invalidate state laws that his clients say allow unions to trespass on their property.
The five-seat board currently only has three members: Chairman Philip A. Miscimarra (R) and Members Mark Gaston Pearce (D) and Lauren McFerran (D). The vacant seats are reserved for Republicans. The Board is generally composed of three Members of the President’s party and two from the other party.
If President Trump’s nominees are confirmed by the Senate, the NLRB will have its first Republican majority in nine years.
As discussed in our earlier advisory, the board is likely to consider a number of significant legal issues once the vacancies are filled, including the NLRB’s test for determining whether joint employer relationships exist, the standards for evaluating whether handbooks and work rules interfere with employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act “(NLRA”), appropriate units for collective bargaining, the question of whether graduate students and research assistants are 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.
While this will ultimately be a welcome change to employers, for those with cases pending the current union leaning majority may still have several months to issue Obama-era type decisions.
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