Within hours of President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, his administration did something unusual: It told the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, a former management-side attorney scheduled to serve until fall, that he could either resign that day or get fired. When the Donald Trump appointee, Peter Robb, refused to step down, Biden removed and replaced him, first with a stand-in and then with Jennifer Abruzzo, a former union attorney and agency veteran, who’s now in her fifth month holding one of the government’s most pivotal workplace positions.
Abruzzo, 58, enforces the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which establishes private-sector workers’ organizing and protest rights. That law doesn’t let workers file private lawsuits to enforce those rights, and it restricts states from doing it themselves. Instead, it vests the responsibility with the NLRB, whose general counsel can unilaterally decide which sorts of cases get prosecuted and thus also which ones the agency’s five members even have the chance to consider.
