Trump’s Big Firing Spree Is Screwing the Working Class
The National Labor Relations Board is the main federal agency that enforces labor laws. People often think that job is done by the Labor Department (which is not an independent agency and predates the NLRB), but that’s mistaken. The Labor Department’s role regulating management-labor relations is more circumscribed, focusing on things like minimum wage and overtime laws. If you’re trying to organize your workplace, or if your employer is violating some labor law, the federal agency you deal with is almost always the NLRB.
Like the EEOC, the NLRB has three board members from the president’s party and two from the opposing party. As with the EEOC, NLRB members serve staggered terms of five years, and without a three-person quorum the commission can’t operate. Unlike the EEOC, the NLRB had two vacancies rather than one when Trump came into office—Democrat Lauren McFerren’s term ended this past December, and Republican John Ring’s ended in December 2022—so all Trump had to do was fire a single board member, Democrat Gwynne Wilcox, to deny the NLRB a quorum.
The EEOC was created under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which said commissioners would serve five-year terms but did not otherwise spell out the circumstances of their dismissal. It didn’t have to, because way back in 1935 the Supreme Court had ruled that a president could not dismiss at will commissioners or members of any independent agency that performed quasi-legislative and judicial functions (such as the EEOC, which did not yet exist). The case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, arose from President Franklin Roosevelt trying in 1933 to fire a conservative anti–New Deal commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission named William Humphrey. Humphrey, a cranky former representative from Washington state, had been appointed by Roosevelt’s predecessors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and he sued to get his job back. Humphrey died from a stroke one year after his firing, but Humphrey’s heirs continued the lawsuit on the grounds that Humphrey was owed back pay. They won.
