On Aug. 1, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee voted to advance two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. Democrat Lauren McFerran’s nomination to serve another term as chair passed in a party-line vote, 11-10. The nomination of Republican Josh Ditelberg passed with a bipartisan vote of 18-3. A full Senate vote on these two nominations is not yet scheduled.

On July 26, the National Labor Relations Board issued its misnamed Fair Choice-Employee Voice final rule, which rescinds the ABC-supported 2020 Election Protection final rule, jeopardizing employees’ right of free choice in representational matters and disrupting the Board’s current representation processes. The 2020 final rule was intended to “better protect employees’ statutory right of free choice on questions concerning representation.”

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Chevron, USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council. ABC’s general counsel, Littler Mendelson, provided an analysis of the decision.

On March 21, ABC wrote a letter in support of H.R. 7784, the Start Applying Labor Transparency Act or SALT Act (introduced by Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah), which would amend the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959. Its purpose is to clarify that labor organizations and their consultants must report when they engage in a coercive tactic known as “salting”—a process where unions send professionally trained organizers into merit shop workplaces under the guise of seeking employment.

On March 14, the ABC-led Coalition for a Democratic Workplace sent a letter to the leaders of key subcommittees in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate urging them to protect secret ballots in union representation elections.

On Feb. 6, 2024, ABC and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace sent a letter to two congressional committees urging them to use their oversight authority to rein in the National Labor Relations Board and its general counsel for creating significant tension between federal antidiscrimination law and federal labor law. The letter was sent in light of a recent supplemental decision in the Amazon.com Services LLC v. Gerald Bryson case, in which the NLRB held that Amazon illegally fired a worker who was verbally attacking a co-worker while on strike.

On Feb. 9, the ABC-led Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and 15 employer organizations filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific v. NLRB, in which the National Labor Relations Board altered the union representation election process to essentially eliminate secret ballot elections in place of card check. The CDW called on the 9th Circuit to set aside and decline to enforce the NLRB’s order, which takes away employees’ right to choose representation without pressure or coercion.

On July 25, the ABC-led Coalition for a Democratic Workplace testified before a House subcommittee on the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (H.R. 2474), which would jeopardize workers’ privacy, constitutional rights and freedoms if passed. This legislation currently has 186 Democrat cosponsors and is essentially a “union boss wish list,” as Ranking Member Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) described it in his opening statement.

ABC reaffirmed its strong opposition to the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) reissued “ambush election” proposal in a letter to the leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce ahead of this morning’s full committee hearing. The hearing, titled “Culture of Union Favoritism: The Return of the NLRB’s Ambush Election Rule,” and ABC’s letter focused on NLRB’s shift under the Obama Administration from a neutral arbiter of federal labor law to an advocate of union organizing.

As expected, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Feb. 5 reissued a proposed rulemaking that will reduce the amount of time between when a union files a representation petition and an election takes place from the current average of 38 days to as few as 10.