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
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.