The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): a Timeline
The NLRB: Are We Getting More Political?
Article By Harrison Rose Tate
Here's a look at major milestones, as they happened. You're not imagining it. We live in a time where they're occurring more frequently.
Here's my short take on the meaning/impact of these events, throughout the years:
| Event | Description |
|---|---|
| Passage of the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) | Established the NLRB and gave workers the legal right to form unions, strike, and bargain collectively, revolutionizing labor protections in the U.S. |
| Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. ruling | Upheld the constitutionality of the NLRA, legitimizing federal enforcement of collective bargaining rights. |
| Passage of the Taft-Hartley Act | Weakened union power by banning secondary boycotts and allowing states to pass right-to-work laws; gave employers more leverage. |
| Radio Officers' Union v. NLRB | Affirmed that union organizers are employees protected under the NLRA, even when engaged in advocacy. |
| First General Counsel Manual issued | Standardized how the General Counsel should interpret and prosecute NLRA violations. |
| Lynchburg Foundry case | Marked the first major NLRB decision addressing racial discrimination in hiring and discipline. |
| Executive Order 10988 | Recognized the collective bargaining rights of federal workers, laying groundwork for later public sector unionism. |
| Jefferson Standard case | Allowed employers to fire employees for disparaging their company, even during union activity, if the criticism wasn't directly related to labor conditions. |
| Creation of NLRB Division of Advice | Created an internal unit to provide strategic legal opinions on complex or precedent-setting labor disputes. |
| Weingarten Rights established | Guaranteed unionized employees the right to representation during investigatory interviews that could lead to discipline. |
| Fibreboard ruling | Ruled that employers can't outsource unionized work to save money without first bargaining in good faith with the union. |
| Wright Line test established | Established a burden-shifting test for employers accused of retaliating against union activity still used today. |
| Electronic filing system introduced | Brought the NLRB into the digital era by enabling electronic document submissions. |
| Office of Representation Appeals created | Created a new appeals body to streamline contested union representation decisions. |
| Guard Publishing decision | Permitted employers to restrict employee use of company email for union organizing, sparking years of policy flip-flops. |
| Dana Corp. decision | Weakened voluntary recognition by allowing a 45-day challenge window after employer neutrality agreements. |
| Online complaint filing system launched | Modernized public access to labor law complaints by offering online filing of unfair labor practices. |
| Noel Canning case | Invalidated hundreds of Obama-era decisions after ruling his recess appointments to the NLRB were unconstitutional. |
| Ambush election rule enacted | Allowed union elections to be held in as few as 13 days, cutting down employers' time to mount anti-union campaigns. |
| Browning-Ferris decision | Redefined joint employment to include indirect control, threatening franchise and staffing business models. |
| The Boeing Co. decision | Let employers maintain broad workplace conduct rules unless explicitly used to chill union activity, making it harder to challenge them. |
| Joint-employer rule finalized | Reversed the 2015 joint-employer expansion, requiring direct and immediate control to qualify as joint employer. |
| General Motors decision | Held that employers can discipline profane or offensive speech during union activity if they apply rules consistently. |
| Biden replaces Peter Robb with Jennifer Abruzzo | Biden fired Trump’s aggressively anti-union GC Peter Robb on Day 1 and installed Jennifer Abruzzo, who pledged to reverse years of employer-friendly decisions. |
| Cemex ruling | Reinstated automatic card-check recognition and ended captive audience meetings, allowing unions to gain recognition without elections if employer misconduct taints process. |
| Starbucks nationwide cease-and-desist order | Imposed a sweeping national order against Starbucks after systemic and repeated violations of workers’ rights to organize. |
| Trump’s illegal NLRB firings ruled unconstitutional | Supreme Court ruled Trump violated the law by removing NLRB members mid-term, undermining the agency’s independence. |
| DOGE access/Musk conflict of interest | Elon Musk's companies were under NLRB scrutiny when DOGE accessed labor data without traceability, raising alarms over conflict of interest and misuse of federal systems. |
What's next for the National Labor Relations Board?
Whether you’re a union representative, an employee (represented by a union or not), an employer, or a citizen curious about democratic infrastructure (like me), what happens at the NLRB tells a story. That story has hundreds of different interpretations, depending upon who you ask.
What do you think comes next? All (civil) comments and intriguing dialogue welcome here.
