An appeal has been filed over the National Labor Relations Board’s rejection of a case against President Trump’s presidential campaign and his transition organization that said confidentiality agreements workers were required to sign were unlawful.
The board’s general counsel said the rules were “facially lawful” and noted that the organization that filed the complaint did not purport to do so on behalf of any actual campaign employees.
An appeal in the case was filed Wednesday, said David Rosenfeld, an Alameda, Calif., labor rights lawyer representing the organization that filed the complaint, the Committee to Preserve the Religious Right to Organize. “The general counsel said there was no evidence that the campaign had enforced the confidentiality clauses, but they have enforced them against [former Trump adviser] Steven Bannon and Stormy Daniels,” Rosenfeld told the Washington Examiner. Daniels is a porn star Trump allegedly had an affair with.
Rosenfeld added that he had recently filed a separate NLRB complaint about Bannon’s and Daniels’ cases and had also called for NLRB General Counsel Peter Robb to recuse himself “because he was appointed by Trump.”
The complaint against the campaign said that four sections of the Trump campaign’s code of ethical conduct requiring workers to “keep confidential non-public information” about the campaign violated the National Labor Relations Act’s rules covering worker communications. It was filed the day of the 2016 election and was officially rejected by the board in November, according to documents recently made public.
Kathy King, the NLRB’s acting regional director for New York, said in a Nov. 28 letter to Rosenfeld that even if the confidentiality clause violated the law there was no evidence it was ever applied to the workers. She added: “You do not purport to have filed your charge on behalf of any particular employees of Donald J. Trump for President Inc., and the absence of such connection further supports exercising prosecutorial discretion … to decline to issue complaint here.”
Rosenfeld said the confidentiality clauses prevented any employee from making a complaint in the first place. He said it was irrelevant that he did not represent a campaign worker because anybody can file a complaint with the board.
He also represented the Committee to Preserve the Religious Right to Organize, which has the same address as his office, in a separate 2016 NLRB complaint against the Trump Vineyard Estates that was rejected by the general counsel last year. The complaint said the vineyard violated the NLRA by setting a curfew for temporary foreign workers hired through the H-2B visa program. As in the complaint against the campaign, no actual vineyard workers were party to the case.
Rosenfeld has appealed that case as well and has called on NLRB member William Emanuel to recuse himself from any board matter until his former law firms “submit complete lists of their clients so that the board, member Emanuel, and the public can determine whether it is necessary that member Emanuel recuse himself from considering certain cases before the board.”
