By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -President Donald Trump has removed a Democratic member of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board from office, an unprecedented move that will escalate an ongoing legal battle over the scope of the president’s powers to control federal agencies.
Gwynne Wilcox, who was appointed to the board by Democratic former President Joe Biden, in a statement called her firing late Monday illegal and said she would pursue “all legal avenues” to challenge it.
The NLRB has five members appointed by the president, and before Wilcox was fired it had a 2-1 Democratic majority and two vacancies. Without her, the board will lack a quorum and cannot issue decisions even in routine cases accusing companies or unions of violating federal labor law.
Once board members are confirmed, federal law allows them to be removed only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” About two dozen companies, including Amazon.com and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, have filed lawsuits since last year challenging those protections and other aspects of the NLRB’s structure.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear whether Trump, a Republican, gave a reason for terminating Wilcox.
Trump late Monday also fired the NLRB’s general counsel, Biden appointee Jennifer Abruzzo, who acts like a prosecutor and plays a key role in shaping board policy. That move was expected after courts upheld Biden’s 2021 termination of Peter Robb, a labor lawyer appointed to the role by Trump.
Together, the firings signal a sharp turn away from the union-friendly policies and legal theories embraced by the board under Biden.
As a board member, Wilcox voted to bar employers from holding mandatory anti-union meetings, to create a new path for unions to represent workers outside of the decades-old election process, and to make it easier to require companies to bargain with contract and franchise workers.
Abruzzo in a statement said the board’s efforts to empower workers in recent years would have a lasting impact.
“So, if the Agency does not fully effectuate its congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands,” she said.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)
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