WASHINGTON—In probably their final instance of hostility to unions and workers, Sens. Joe Manchin, Ind-W. Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, Ind-Ariz., sank the nomination of National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran to a new five-year term on the NLRB.
The two retiring senators were the key votes in the Senate’s 49-50 rejection of McFerran, joining all 48 voting Republicans in opposing her. All the Senate Democrats and both other independents—Maine’s Angus King and Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders of Vermont—supported her. One Republican was absent.
The result of the December 10 vote is that McFerran leaves office on December 16. That leaves the board, which governs labor-management relations for the vast majority of U.S. workers, with two vacancies that rabidly anti-worker Republican President-elect Donald Trump will be able to fill, converting the board into a 3-to-2 Republican majority.
And in an indication of just how hostile the GOP is to workers when Democratic President Joe Biden nominated McFerran, he also had to send to the Senate the Republicans’ choice for a vacant GOP board seat: Chicago attorney Joshua Ditelberg of the notorious union-busting firm Seyfarth Shaw. Ditelberg’s nomination never came up for a vote.
The defeat of McFerran is not the first time Manchin and Sinema sabotaged workers, or even the most prominent. His opposition to killing the Senate filibuster and her silence on that issue—while receiving loads of campaign contributions from corporate and financial lobbies—robbed the Protecting The Right To Organize Act, labor’s top legislative priority, of a majority, too.
“As chair of the National Labor Relations Board, Lauren McFerran has done an exceptional job protecting workers’ rights & standing up against illegal union busting. It’s imperative that a majority of senators vote to reconfirm her this week so she can continue this vital work,” Sanders said in a tweet.
The Republicans, Manchin and Sinema didn’t stand up for McFerran. The duos’ websites gave no clues about why they opposed her, and the official record of the debate was unavailable.
The vote severely disappointed AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. Sanders’ successor next year in the Labor Committee chair, right-wing Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., snidely sneered at McFerran, cheered that Trump could pack the board, and flat-out lied that Trump will be a pro-worker president.
“Fifty senators didn’t just vote against Lauren McFerran’s reconfirmation—they voted against the working people of this country,” Shuler said. “Make no mistake: This vote had nothing to do with stopping Chair McFerran’s renomination and everything to do with reversing generations of progress workers have made toward building a fairer and more just economy.
“The NLRB is the only government agency that protects workers’ fundamental freedom to stand up to powerful companies by organizing a union and bargaining collectively on the job. Without every NLRB seat filled, the board cannot keep up with the historic rate of worker organizing or the escalating union-busting we see from bosses every day,” Shuler stated.
“The NLRB faces relentless intimidation and threats from the very corporations and wealthy bosses the agency is tasked with holding accountable…The NLRB urgently needed McFerran reconfirmed to ensure working people can rely on the board when massive companies violate our basic rights.
“Corporate lobbyists and anti-union politicians may have stopped this vote today, but they won’t stop workers from organizing…The labor movement was born out of the fight for the very rights the NLRB protects, and we won’t stop until every single worker in America has a fair and free shot to join a union and better our lives.”
Cassidy’s hostility boiled over as he crowed about McFerran’s defeat.
He called her “an extreme Biden-Harris nominee who orchestrated NLRB’s weaponization against American workers,” without proving that charge.
“With three weeks left of a Senate Democrat majority, this was a clear attempt to deny President Trump the opportunity to choose his own nominee.” Republicans as a class use the word “Democrat” as an insult by dropping the “ic.” Cassidy also inaugurated Trump even before the president-elect officially retakes the office.
“This NLRB seat should be filled by President Trump and the new incoming Senate. Not a historically unpopular president and a Senate Democrat majority that has lost its mandate to govern.”
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