Throughout his presidency, Joe Biden promised he would be “the most pro-union president in American history,” but “pro-union” didn’t necessarily translate into “pro-worker.”

And now nearly two years into Donald Trump's second presidency, the Biden remake of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) persists with pro-union decisions frequently overturned by courts, companies frustrated by their inability to settle complaints and a massive backlog gumming up the system and keeping workers from getting their cases resolved.

The situation is so bad that even President Barack Obama’s former NLRB chief admits his agency has lost its shine as a neutral arbiter.

“The NLRB ceased being an honest broker in the Biden administration,” Philip Miscimarra, former chairman of the NLRB who was appointed by Obama and served through the first year of Trump’s first term, told Just the News.

“There’s a shelf life on these situations, because it takes the law a long time to catch up,” he added.

On his first day in office, Biden replaced the general counsel of the NLRB, an independent federal agency formed in 1935, with Jennifer Abruzzo, a union-aligned attorney who now works for the Communications Workers of America as well as a private attorney for the California-based law firm of Bush Gottlieb.

That law firm boasts on its webpage that "the firm remains true to its original purpose of supporting progressive social movements." The CWA collects roughly $119 million to $128 million in dues annually, according to the Department of Labor.

Reuters reported that the Senate narrowly confirmed Abruzzo in 2021 to a four-year term as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, after Republicans questioned her role in the firing of the first Trump-era GC.

Neither Abruzzo nor the CWA responded to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

Critics say she established a culture at odds with the original purpose of the NLRB

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government, created during Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first term by Congress in 1935 to enforce labor law, as defined by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The board was initially created for the primary purpose of allowing workers to organize, and to decide whether to bargain collectively through representatives of their choice.  

Critics say that under Abruzzo, it was the unions that were protected.

Stefan Marculewicz, a former NLRB trial attorney who has been practicing traditional labor law for nearly 35 years, told Just the News that never in his years of practice has he “ever seen an agency as weaponized, as [the NLRB] was, during the Biden years.” That culture appears to be embedded in the NLRB to this day.

When Abruzzo was replaced by Trump, she released a statement regarding her reign as general counsel. “There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle,” she said. 

“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 in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations.”

The Biden administration allowed just about any grievance — including political speech and social criticism — to go before the NLRB, leaving the board with a backlog of approximately 17,000 cases – about 10,000 of which have been pending for six months or more, according to a report reviewed by Just the News, from the Jackson-Alvarez Group, a Conservative/Republican political consulting and opposition research firm.

The report found that instead of focussing on collective bargaining — the primary mission of the NLRB — the NLRB pursued expansive interpretations of the law and dedicated significant resources to hypothetical or technical violations, with many cases resulting in adverse impacts on employees.

The NLRB did not respond to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.

The NLRB vs. Home Depot: Political messaging is not about working conditions

In 2020, a Minnesota Home Depot employee wrote “BLM” (Black Lives Matter) on his work apron and was told to remove the letters because it violated company dress code rules against political messages. The employee refused and resigned, later filing a labor complaint. In August 2021, NLRB lawyers got involved, arguing that BLM fell outside Home Depot’s rules because the rule only applied to messages “unrelated to workplace matters,” but the store had previously experienced some racial tensions.

NLRB Judge Paul Bogas disagreed, stating that in order to be protected, the message had to be a group effort to improve working conditions. "Rather, the record shows that the message was primarily used, and generally understood, to address the unjustified killings of Black individuals by law enforcement and vigilantes," Bogas wrote. 

"A message about unjustified killings of Black men, while a matter of profound societal importance, is not directly relevant to the terms, conditions, or a lot of Home Depot's employees as employees," the NLRB's Administrative Law judge ruled.

Abruzzo, Biden’s NLRB general counsel, appealed the ruling to the NLRB, which issued its own decision against Home Depot in February 2024. “It is well-established that workers have the right to join together to improve their working conditions — including by protesting racial discrimination in the workplace,” said then-NLRB Chairman Lauren McFerran. “It is equally clear that an employee who acts individually to support a group protest regarding a workplace issue remains protected under the law.”

The NLRB claimed that BLM was protected speech and that when an employer prohibits an employee from wearing that insignia, the “interference is presumptively unlawful, and the employer has the burden to establish special circumstances that make the rule necessary to maintain production or discipline.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reversed the NLRB's ruling in December 2025, finding in favor of the retailer's argument that employees displaying BLM messages "would harm its relationship with customers and its public image, jeopardized employee safety, and exacerbated employee dissension."

NLRB argues profanity as a "union activity"

In another case, this time involving Starbucks, the NLRB seemingly suggested that profanity-laced tirades were protected speech if the employee issuing them was involved in union activity. In the spring of 2022, a union organizer and shift supervisor in Latham, New York, was fired after a series of infractions, including profane texts in a group chat, failing to complete his tasks during his shift, and opening a letter addressed to Starbucks from the NLRB.

An administrative law judge concluded that the employee’s termination didn’t violate NLRB rules. The NLRB made its own contrary decision, arguing that the employee’s firing was a pretext to stop union activity and that Starbucks had previously allowed minor swearing in the past.

But this employee was not engaging in minor swearing. In texts reviewed by Just the News, the employee engaged in an obscenity-filled tirade against another employee with a documented medical condition and against management. The tirade contained nearly 30 curse words in just a few text chains.

The NLRB reversed the administrative law judge’s ruling, claiming that Starbucks would not have fired the employee had he not been involved in union activity.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit took up Starbucks’ appeal in Starbucks v. NLRB, and reversed the NLRB decision in May 2026, holding that it was “not convinced the Board adequately considered contradictory evidence.”

“For one, the Board’s decision did not sufficiently address evidence that no other employee had used such extreme profanity targeted at coworkers. It noted evidence that other employees used profanity in the workplace, but that is a far cry from such extreme and sexist language aimed at a fellow employee and his supervisor.” 

One appellate judge referred to "wild-eyed, profanity-laden rants" and continued to say, "Then the Board entirely ignored it. That is not the stuff of reasonable, fair minded adjudication. So I would not give the Board a second chance to do the right thing."

The case is still being adjudicated.

Targeting Starbucks and Amazon

Under the Biden administration, unions were encouraged to file unfair labor practices against big companies, such as Amazon and Starbucks, resulting in a massive backlog, attorney Tom Crawford told Just the News.

“They made all kinds of filings against companies that were the targets of union action,” Crawford said. “And these [unfair labor practice challenges] were enabled by an NLRB field staff, particularly the regional directors and others, who were allowing these cases to move forward when, in general, in the past would have been to sort out the frivolous things.”

Starbucks, according to multiple people who spoke to Just the News, is the target of more cases in the NLRB backlog than any other employer, and the company has indicated that it wants to settle those cases – even the ones that it believes it could win in court. A cursory search of Google Scholar shows hundreds of such cases.

But under Abruzzo, settlements were rare due to demands she placed on them, including seeking extreme and punitive remedies as part of settlement demands. Examples include requiring the parties to read NLRB notices or seeking foreseeable pecuniary damages such as late fees, medical expenses, mortgage interest, or job search costs. Though several Circuit Courts of Appeal have refused to recognize these demands as within the NLRB’s authority, it is not the rule across the country.

While appellate courts have been reversing NLRB decisions since Trump took office again, it means much of the first two years of Trump’s second term has been spent trying to undo the excess of Biden’s NLRB.

“It’s like trying to swim through molasses,” Miscimarra said.

Unfair elections under Biden NLRB, missing ballots, multiple ballots

One of the most basic duties of the NLRB is to ensure representation elections are conducted fairly and transparently, but a July 8, 2023, report from the NLRB’s Inspector General cited “gross mismanagement” of a union election.

The case began in early 2023, when a whistleblower alleged that NLRB officials in St. Louis, Missouri, coordinated with Starbucks Workers United (SWU) to ensure a union election was successful. The IG's report found that NLRB regional employees communicated directly with union officials during a mail ballot election, and worked to ensure that preferred voters – those favorable to unionization – would receive duplicate and triplicate ballots to be counted for the union.

In June 2024, another IG report found that the NLRB failed to ensure all employees received a ballot during a union election, with 49% of audited elections showing at least one voter not receiving a ballot.

“These reports and allegations of repeated impropriety within NLRB elections are deeply concerning. The NLRB is statutorily charged with enforcing the National Labor Relations Act without favor to unions, employers, or workers,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., then the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. “This Board, however, is uninterested in neutrality; instead, it has spent three years issuing decisions and conducting elections in a way that ensure big labor unions get a leg up in the process.”

Companies' speech about unions suppressed, called "unfair labor practices"

In April 2022, Abruzzo issued a memorandum that overturned decades of case law allowing employers to purportedly educate employees about unionization. In June 2022, former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., then the ranking member of the Senate HELP Committee, sent a letter to Abruzzo asking how the memorandum came to be and what legal authority she had to issue it.

“Granting the Board nearly unlimited remedial make-whole measures and classifying mandatory employer-sponsored meetings as unfair labor practices were both proposals in the Protecting the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act), which Congress has conspicuously chosen not to pass. We do not believe it mere coincidence that you are now attempting to implement these policies via memoranda,” Burr and Senate Republicans wrote at the time.

The memoranda essentially stated that employers merely expressing anti-union sentiments in compelled meetings were engaging in unfair labor practices, even if such utterances didn’t contain threats of reprisal, intimidation, or promises of benefits for opposing a union.

The current NLRB is made up of three Republicans and one Democrat, and Abruzzo was replaced as general counsel in January 2025. Abruzzo returned to the Communications Workers of America (CWA) as a senior advisor to the president; she previously served as general counsel for the union before Biden nominated her for NLRB general counsel. Neither she nor CWA responded to a Just the News inquiry prior to press time.