President Donald Trump purged two National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) leaders known for supporting worker rights on Tuesday, signaling a sharp re-orientation of federal law enforcement towards a management-friendly approach favored by business executives and supporters like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Jennifer Abruzzo, former President Joe Biden’s appointee as the NLRB’s general counsel, was fired by email late on Monday. Gwynne Wilcox, one of two Democratic board members, received her notice on Tuesday morning, but said she would pursue “all legal avenues” to challenge it.
Federal law allows the removal of a board member only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” though a U.S. appeals court ruled in 2021 that such protection does not extend to the panel’s chief prosecutor, which at the time allowed Biden to fire Trump-appointed NLRB general counsel Peter Robb.
Business executives like Musk have recently argued that presidents should be able to fire board members at will. Last year, Musk’s company, SpaceX, joined Amazon in leading a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB in its current form; the board enforces workers’ rights to organize, demand better working conditions, and join or dissolve a union. Federal labor law bars workers from suing their employers in court, so the NLRB is typically their only recourse.
The hostile company reaction coincided with an NLRB that increasingly sided with workers and unions over management, an approach favored by the officials Trump fired. Over her three-and-a-half years as the NLRB’s general counsel, Abruzzo pursued a slew of notable cases against Apple, Tesla, the New York Times and Starbucks, which still faces dozens of cases over its alleged suppression of a nationwide unionization drive.
A settlement she secured with Amazon in 2021, which required the company to allow workers to organize in its breakrooms during their time off, paved the way for employees at one of its warehouses to unionize the following year. Last November, Wilcox and a majority of the board voted to bar Amazon from holding mandatory “captive audience meetings” designed to threaten or persuade voters against forming a union. This month, Abruzzo issued a complaint against private prison company GEO Group, accusing it of using solitary confinement to punish immigrant detainees who supported labor strikes.
While Trump has often claimed to be supportive of labor, the removal of Abruzzo and Wilcox is a clear signal that he intends to continue the legacy of his first term, when he filled key roles at the NLRB and other agencies with pro-management lawyers who pushed changes that gave companies more power over workers. And even on the campaign trail, Trump expressed support for Musk’s idea of firing striking workers en masse.
With Wilcox gone, the NLRB will have three vacancies, depriving it of the necessary quorum to rule on routine cases involving companies or unions accused of violating federal labor law. Hundreds of cases are still pending, which a Trump-appointed Republican majority could use to overturn Biden-era precedents that protected workers from unfair labor laws. Even if a court ruling put Wilcox back in her seat, a Republican majority was virtually guaranteed after former Sens. Joe Manchin, I-W.V., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., joined the GOP in blocking the re-nomination of Lauren McFerran to serve on the board.
Nonetheless, Abruzzo said in a statement that after the landmark rulings issued by the NLRB during the Biden administration, there was “no putting that genie back in the bottle.”
“If the Agency does not fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations,” she said.
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