WASHINGTON – Today, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced legislation that would strip the National Labor Relations Board of its power to prosecute and adjudicate labor disputes. The “Protecting American Jobs Act” would transfer the power to hear labor disputes to federal courts. The NLRB would retain the power to conduct investigations, but would not be allowed to prosecute them.
“For far too long the NLRB has acted as judge, jury, and executioner, for labor disputes in this country,” Sen. Lee said. “The havoc they have wrought by upsetting decades of established labor law has cost countless jobs. This common sense legislation would finally restore fairness and accountability to our nation’s labor laws."
The NLRB consists of five members all of whom are appointed by the president. Normally these members are confirmed by the Senate but President Obama illegally appointed three members without Senate consent in 2012. The NLRB then went on to issue more than one hundred illegal decisions before the Supreme Court ordered them vacated in 2013.
The NLRB does have a full five-member board today, but only because Senate Democrats broke the Senate’s filibuster rule and confirmed three new members by a bare majority just weeks after Senate Democrats suffered historic losses at the polls.
Since that time the NLRB has gone on to issue a slew of partisan, controversial, and disruptive opinions, including the recent Browning-Ferris decision which upended more than 30-years of settled law in the area of joint-employer law governing how franchises, franchisees, and employers interact.
