Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., announced Wednesday John Ring, President Trump’s choice to fill the last remaining seat on the National Labor Relations Board, will have a committee vote on Feb. 14.
Ring’s confirmation would give the board, the federal government’s top labor law enforcement agency, a Republican majority through at least 2020.
“Last year, our committee worked to confirm two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board with the hope of restoring it to the neutral umpire it was intended to be. We have seen a return to balance in labor law through the Board’s recent decisions to overturn the Obama-era ‘joint-employer’ standard and micro-union rule, and confirming John Ring will continue that trend,” said Alexander, chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Ring, a former lawyer with the management-side firm Morgan Lewis, would fill the open seat left behind by former Chairman Philip Miscimarra, who stepped down in December. His confirmation would return the board, currently split evenly between Republican and Democrat appointees, to a 3-2 GOP majority.
The board achieved a reputation for pro-union activism during the Obama administration, something the Trump White House and congressional Republicans have been eager to reverse. A 2015 post on the Morgan Lewis website touted Ring as being able to help clients with an “activist” NLRB.
Last year, the Senate confirmed three other Trump picks to the board: former GOP House staffer Marvin Kaplan to an open seat, business lawyer Bill Emanuel to another open seat and private sector lawyer Peter Robb as the board’s general council. Trump also appointed Kaplan chairman after Miscimarra stepped down.
Emanuel has been under fire for Democrats who believe he should have recused himself from a December case called Hy-Brand that reversed a major Obama-era ruling on the “joint employer” standard.
The Obama-era board declared in the case Browning-Ferris that a business could be liable for workplace violations at another business if it had “indirect control” over the latter company’s workers, a potentially vast expansion of corporate legal liability. The Hy-Brand case restored “joint employer” to the older standard requiring “direct control.”
Emanuel’s former firm, Littler Mendelson, had represented one of the plaintiffs in Browning-Ferris and he voted in the Hy-Brand case. The board’s Office of the Inspector General is reportedly investigating whether Emanuel should have recused himself.
