WASHINGTON—Crystal Carey, the union-buster whom President Donald Trump named as General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, plans a mass trashing of Biden-era pro-worker rules, starting with overturning the curbs on captive audience meetings, plus restoring limits on union insignia workers can wear on their caps and uniforms.
And Carey’s plans carry weight. As the NLRB’s General Counsel, she is its de facto chief of staff and, more importantly, its top enforcement officer. Before taking the GC post, Carey was a senior partner at Morgan, Lewis and Bockius, one of the nation’s biggest union-busters.
Which means once Carey gets done, worker protections instituted by the Biden-era NLRB and its general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, will disappear. One already has.
That’s the one where Abruzzo convinced the Biden-era NLRB to enlarge the definition of finally making whole a worker whom the boss illegally fired for union advocacy, organizing, or both.
For decades, until Abruzzo took over, the NLRB’s penalties for such illegal actions were small: Ordering the firm to post a “we broke the law and promise not to do it again” notice and to award the worker net back pay.
That was the difference between what the fired worker would have earned between the time she was canned and the time the board ruled in her favor, minus whatever pay from other jobs she could line up to keep body, soul, and family alive.
Except in unusual cases, where the NLRB sought damages, too, the amounts were small. And they didn’t deter companies from breaking labor laws.
With the Biden board’s OK, Abruzzo changed that. Net back pay became that sum plus reimbursing the worker for any extra expenses she shouldered while waiting for the board’s ruling, from loans to take care of missed mortgage payments or rent to paying for health insurance to running up credit card debt for all of that, and more. The idea was to really make companies pay for harming their workers.
One of Carey’s first acts on becoming General Counsel was to change that back.
Now, according to management-side law firms, who are anticipating the moves, Carey wants to dump even more of the Biden-era pro-worker rules. But to keep the changes under the radar, Carey’s memo to NLRB regional officials stresses more cases must be settled there, not routed to Washington for review.
In the meantime, Carey’s on the lookout for cases that would allow her office to reverse the Biden-era rules. Other than the reimbursement rule, it hasn’t reversed any yet. Now, with a 3-1 GOP majority on the Trump-era board, labor law attorneys say, Carey can start actively scoping out potential cases to use to reverse the Biden-era protections.
Besides restoring bosses’ rights to discipline or even fire workers who won’t attend captive audience meetings—where bosses and their union-busters can harangue, threaten and even outright lie about unions—and curbing union insignia on uniforms, other items on Carey’s agenda include:
- Restoring firms’ rights to make “unilateral settlement offers” of cases to the board’s administrative law judges, without having to negotiate them with the General Counsel or the union.
- Only severance agreements which explicitly break labor law on specific rights—such as banning workers from gathering together for mutual protection and aid—would be outlawed. Threats to institute severance agreements now are not kosher. Carey legalizes the threats.
- Restoring employers’ rights to make wide-ranging predictions, usually during the captive audience meetings or in one-on-one sessions with bosses quizzing workers, about the negative impact of unionization. The only illegal predictions, Carey says, would be those which carry “retaliatory threats” against the workers for unionizing, such as threats to shut down.
- Restoring teeth to so-called “management rights” contract clauses.
- More “latitude” for bosses to have “reasonable work rules” in their employee handbooks, without the requirement that if a worker reads the work rule as infringing on her rights under the law, the work rule is illegal.
A check of union lawyers’ websites, including one the AFL-CIO sponsors and the National Lawyers Guild, produces no reaction yet. The AFL-CIO group’s main goal, its site says, is to recruit and train new attorneys in the labor side of labor law, so they can help unions.
The top lawmaker who protested all of this, in advance, was Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., who heads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee’s minority, combining Democrats and independents. He spoke up at Carey’s confirmation hearing in early 2025.
All the committee Democrats voted against Carey. If Democrats retake Senate control this fall, Sanders—labor’s longest and most outspoken congressional supporter—will retake control of the HELP panel.
“When Donald Trump fires the most pro-union General Counsel in the history of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and illegally removes a member of this independent board, he is not a champion of the working class. He is a champion of unfettered corporate greed and union busters,” Sanders said then.
“What does this mean? It means that it will be far, far harder for workers to exercise their constitutional right to form a union and improve their standard of living. It means that during a union election, corporate bosses can illegally fire workers who vote to join a union.
“It means corporate CEOs have free rein to illegally intimidate and coerce pro-union workers without recourse. It means corporations can aggressively decide not to bargain in good faith with union workers or sign a first contract.”
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