I found an article titled “Trump’s National Labor Relations Board is Sabotaging Its

Own Mission: The federal agency that’s supposed to protect union rights is instead

championing the interests of bosses.” This article is from Type Investigations that claims

to be a “high-impact investigative reporting” agency “that holds the powerful

accountable.” While this article might be biased because of their mission to hold the

powerful accountable I still found that they made some very good points. It is very clear

that they try to find sources from the ground level, the communities with everyday

people doing work, and share how they are affected by wrongdoing.

This article is an overview of how the National Labor Relations Board is actually

hindering workers rights and has been decimated by the Trump administration. It goes

into depth about many of the policies that were expanded during the Obama

administration to provide more protection and rights to employees from their bosses and

then were later overturned or nullified by the board during the Trump administration.

One of the most influential decisions, according to the article, was the decision to have

a more restrictive joint employer standard which restricts collective bargaining rights for

contracted workers. This article argues that the board under the Trump administration

has “rulings that limit workers’ rights far beyond those under previous Republican

administrations.” Some examples of these rulings include rolling back on pro-worker

regulations.

All of these are extremely concerning from a human rights perspective. Every

time we allow big time employers to ignore the needs and humanity of their workers, we

are giving them more power to cross even more boundaries in the future. I’m worried

about the precedent it creates and the culture it creates. My mind immediately went to
whistleblowers or unions that wanted to take cases to the NLRB and wouldn’t feel

comfortable doing so because of the potential for retribution from their companies

because of the loss of protections from the NLRB. The article even mentioned that a

current NLRB staff member anonymously, for fear of retaliation from the NLRB, said she

noticed a shift towards unions settling to avoid an unfavorable ruling from the NLRB.

This would over-turn the Obama era precedents and none of the unions want that to

happen with this current NLRB. America knows that Trump is an advocate of big

businesses and has high stakes in the business world. It is apparent to me and many

other people that this history of his with big business has impacted the National Labor

Relations Board and shifted it towards benefitting the big businesses and not the

individual needs of the workers.

I believe that people have the right to work and have certain protections. I fear

that this culture shift, on a national level, will lead to minor shifts in management

attitudes towards unions, at an everyday level. I’ve even noticed it in my own workplace,

based on the attitudes of my HR department leading into negotiations for two of our

three unions we have at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. Even when we

were looking into a complaint filed about vacation time, my manager seemed to forget

that these are real people trying to do their work and be treated fairly in the process. It

wasn’t until the Head of Human Resources, Elizabeth, reminded her, they’re not trying

to take advantage of the system and they’re really trying to clarify a gray area in their

CBA. It was very easy to see how they interpreted the CBA and also how we interpreted

the CBA. It just reminded me of how easy it is to fall into the thinking of saving money in

any way possible, even if it means ignoring the rights of union employees.
 References

Chen, M., & Juana Arias/Washington Post via Getty Images. (2020, September 08).

Trump's National Labor Relations Board Is Sabotaging Its Own Mission.

Retrieved September 25, 2020, from

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/09/07/trumps-national-labo

-relations-board-is-sabotaging-its-own-mission/

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/09/07/trumps-national-labor-

relations-board-is-sabotaging-its-own-mission/