June, 20 2024, 11:52am EDT
Project 2025 Would Undo the NLRB’s Progress on Protecting Workers’ Right To Organize
Workers are winning a greater percentage of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-recognized union elections than at any point in the past 15 years. Yet The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 far-right playbook includes a blueprint for eroding the NLRB’s ability to protect organizing workers. A new Center for American Progress analysis explains how this far-right playbook would threaten workers’ ability to come together in unions to bargain for better wages and working conditions.
This new CAP analysis of NLRB elections data has found that:
- In 2023, the union win rate in NLRB elections broke 70 percent for the first time in 15 years.
- The NLRB has won 54 percent more reinstatement offers for illegally fired workers since 2021 than during all four years of the previous administration. This success happened as the NLRB instituted new rules that make it easier for workers to exercise their right to join a union.
- The union win rate has been consistently higher under the Biden administration than under the previous administration.
The Project 2025 policy playbook offers instructions for future administrations to neuter the NLRB’s enforcement capacity and turn it against unions by firing key agency leaders, making it easier to decertify unions, and closing off established ways of forming unions.
“The NLRB has been a key part of the Biden administration’s strategy for empowering workers to ensure they have a fair shot at forming a union,” said Aurelia Glass, policy analyst for the Inclusive Economy team at CAP and author of this analysis. “Crucial appointees are holding lawbreaking corporations accountable and helping reverse a decadeslong trend that allowed bad actors to bust workers’ unions before they could form. Project 2025 offers a playbook for how an administration could jeopardize the NLRB’s ability to protect organizing workers and threatens rolling back unions’ success over the past four years.”
Read the analysis: “Project 2025 Would Undo the NLRB’s Progress on Protecting Workers’ Right To Organize” by Aurelia Glass
The Center for American Progress is a think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. We combine bold policy ideas with a modern communications platform to help shape the national debate, expose the hollowness of conservative governing philosophy and challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter.
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"Marginalized communities in our country have long been denied the justice they deserve. I joined the Biden-Harris administration with the belief that my voice and diverse perspective would lend a hand in the pursuit of that justice," Special Assistant and Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Maryam Hassanein, 24, said in a statement.
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"We welcome this principled resignation by another Biden administration official who took up their post believing they could help the nation, but instead realized they were becoming complicit in the administration's enabling of the far-right Israeli government's genocide in Gaza," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
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