Republicans install anti-worker majority on NLRB

WASHINGTON—The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate voted 51-47, along party lines, to confirm James Macy and reconfirm David Prouty to the National Labor Relations Board. The move hands MAGA a 3-1 majority and clears the way for the capitalist class to dismantle several key pro-worker rulings issued by the NLRB during the Biden administration.

Macy, a Republican and former Department of Labor official with a four-decade career representing management in labor disputes, joins Chairman James Murphy and Member Scott Mayer on the Republican side. Prouty, a former union lawyer first nominated by President Joe Biden in 2021, remains the Board’s sole Democratic member. One seat on the five-member board still remains vacant, but the anti-union majority is now secured.

Labor and its allies, led by the United Electrical Workers (UE), are sounding the alarm that hard-won protections are now in great jeopardy. For instance, it takes three votes for the NLRB to overturn prior precedent. With the balance of power now in their favor, the new MAGA majority’s primary targets are rulings that shifted even marginal power back toward workers and their unions. Until Macy’s confirmation last week, only three members were seated, meaning Murphy and Mayer could not reach the threshold required to reverse past decisions.

According to the UE, for the seven months since the Board regained its quorum on Jan. 7, Murphy and Mayer have been adding footnotes to rulings flagging precedents they want to reconsider once a third Republican vote existed. Journalist Matt Bruenig, who tracks NLRB developments on his Substack, identified 28 rulings across areas including union elections, remedies for management misconduct, workplace rules, bargaining duties, and the legal definitions of employer and employee.

Among the most significant targets is the Cemex decision, which permits the NLRB to issue a bargaining order when a company with majority union support refuses to recognize the union and violates labor law. The bosses are also eyeing the Amazon ruling, which effectively outlawed captive audience meetings. These are mandatory sessions where workers are forced to sit through anti-union messaging under threat of discipline.

Also on the chopping block is Valley Hospital Medical Center II, which requires management to honor dues checkoff agreements even after a contract expires. The McLaren Macomb ruling, which held that merely offering severance agreements with overly broad confidentiality or non-disparagement clauses violates labor law regardless of whether a worker signs, could also be reversed.

Perhaps most concerning, especially for the tens of thousands of organized graduate workers at private universities, is the threat to the Columbia decision. That ruling held that graduate student workers are classified as “employees” under the National Labor Relations Act. Universities have long argued that graduate workers are merely “students” and therefore not entitled to labor protections under the NLRA.

The UE, which alone represents thousands of graduate workers, warned that overturning the Columbia decision would strip private university grad workers of their right to organize and bargain collectively. Graduate workers at public universities are governed by state labor boards, not the NLRB, and could be less directly affected.

But for the private school graduate workers who joined UE recently and will be negotiating second contracts in the next two years, they could face even more hostile conditions without recourse to the NLRB to enforce their rights, the union said.

The NLRB has been in a state of severe instability since President Donald Trump’s returned to office and the Republicans regained power. The crisis deepened, however, when the right-wing Supreme Court greenlit Trump’s firing of Gwynne Wilcox—the first Black woman ever to serve on the Board—in January 2025. No previous president has ever removed an NLRB member without cause.

The NLRB was ostensibly designed as an independent agency insulated from partisan interference, but with a right-wing Supreme Court and an anti-union Republican Senate majority, Trump’s tactic ultimately succeeded, and Wilcox was forced out. Her firing left the Board without a quorum for much of 2025 and effectively halted its ability to issue decisions important to workers.

With Macy’s confirmation, the NLRB now has a full MAGA majority for the first time since Trump took office. General Counsel Crystal Carey is expected to issue a list of prior pro-worker rulings she will prioritize for reversal at the behest of Trump and corporate employers.

The NLRB is currently buried in a mountain of pending cases, which makes it difficult to predict how fast the new MAGA majority will act to overturn pro-worker precedents. But several cases are already in the pipeline, analysts said, and corporations are pushing aggressively for the NLRB to scrap the “union-friendly” rulings from the Biden years.

For workers and their unions, the stakes for the 2026 midterms could not be higher.

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