Ex-NLRB chair envisions a slog for labor

AS THE COUNTRY lurches from the Biden administration—perhaps the most pro-labor White House in American history — to the ferociously antilabor Trump administration, one agency stands in the way of the transition.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

LABOR expert William Gould, right, speaks in 2023 to friend Dusty Baker, then the Houston Astros manager.

(MICHAEL ZAGARIS Getty Images)

It’s the National Labor Relations Board, created in 1935 as a quintessential New Deal regulatory agency. Unfortunately for workers, today, 90 years since its creation, the board is facing an existential threat from Big Business and from a Supreme Court that seems inclined to diminish its authority. Its ability to fight back, however, is burdened by partisan politics and its own history.

That's the view of William B. Gould IV, who served as the board’s chair during the Clinton administration. He views the NLRB's future with “the greatest pessimism,” he says.

Having left the board in 1998, Gould, 89, has kept a weather eye on the agency from his perchas a professor at Stanford Law School, which he first joined in 1972 and where he currently holds an emeritus chair.

“I view what's happening today as part of a continuum,” Gould told me this week. “Since the early 1980s, Congress has attempted to politicize the board to relitigate the assumptions about labor-management relations that got the National Labor Relations Act enacted in 1935. That drum has just gotten louder and louder.”

The key assumption in 1935 was that, in the words of the act’s preamble, “the denial by some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by some employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining” had led to “strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest,” which in turn obstructed commerce.

Accordingly, the act’s very purpose was to protect the workers’ collective bargaining rights — their right to unionize and through a union to negotiate wages and working conditions.

But the act left it up to the board to decide for itself what constitutes an “unfair labor practice” obstructing unionization rights, which the law prohibits.