The AFL-CIO called on the Supreme Court to uphold the independence of federal agencies and protect workers’ ability to seek legal justice when their rights on the job are violated.
Representing 64 unions and 15 million workers, the AFL-CIO filed an amicus brief in Trump v. Slaughter, the president’s bid to expand presidential power and be allowed to fire independent agency officials. If the Supreme Court rules for the president, it will jeopardize the role that Congress envisioned for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) and National Mediation Board, the agencies that provide the main legal avenues for workers seeking to form unions, engage in collective bargaining and get justice against union-busting.
Before Congress created these independent agencies, the government was “wary of holding employers legally accountable, and DOJ was loath to bring criminal charges in labor disputes.” As a result, that “ineffective enforcement led to significant disruption” of our economy and “widespread, turbulent and often violent strikes.” If the Supreme Court allows the president to fire independent agency members at will, it could return Americans to that dark period in history and have serious implications for working people.“Because the President has an interest in the outcome of federal-sector labor disputes,” the AFL-CIO writes, “it would raise constitutional concerns if he could handpick his preferred labor-relations adjudicators to affect the outcome of particular cases.”
Workers’ rights aren’t only implicated in the Supreme Court’s ruling in this case—it goes to the very heart of their legal establishment in this country. The agencies’ futures depend on whether the court upholds precedents established during working people’s fights for their rights, dating back to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and relying on the law that formed the NLRB being upheld. And it was in “the wake of President [Richard] Nixon’s misuse of governmental power to ‘harass and intimidate opponents’” that Congress and President Jimmy Carter established the independent FLRA to protect the federal workforce from being weaponized for the president’s agenda.
The full brief can be found online here.
Contact: Mia Jacobs, 202-637-5018