Rep. Ro Khanna (D-California) has shined a light on how Democrats botched a recent chance to secure a majority on a top U.S. labor authority for the first two years of Trump’s upcoming term, in an “inexplicable and inexcusable” blunder that will likely have dire consequences for millions of workers for years to come.
On December 11, the Senate held a vote on renewing Democrat Lauren McFerran as National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) chair just days before her term expired. Labor advocates were outraged after news broke that the vote failed 49 to 50, with Senators Joe Manchin (I-West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona), formerly Democrats, voted against reconfirming her for a five-year term.
If the Senate had confirmed McFerran, Democrats would have secured a 3-2 majority on the board for the next two years. Instead, Trump will likely nominate a Republican and flip the labor board, in “a huge setback for the hundreds of thousands of workers across this country organizing for a better contract,” Khanna said.
Labor advocates and progressives largely blamed Manchin and Sinema for the vote, as they were instrumental in taking away the Democrats’ majority. But, as Khanna revealed on Tuesday, Democratic leaders also played a key role in handing Republicans the majority.
In a thread on social media, Khanna said Democrats, in fact, had a window to confirm McFerran that morning, while Manchin and two Republicans were absent from the chamber. For 90 minutes, Democrats had the opportunity to call in Vice President Kamala Harris to act as a tie-breaking vote for the confirmation, which needed only to pass with a simple majority. Instead, Senate leaders delayed the vote for “no reason,” Khanna said, and allowed Manchin to return and tank the vote.
That morning, Democratic leaders like Senate Majority Chuck Schumer (D-New York) “failed to get word to Vice President Harris quickly enough to come and deliver the tie-breaking vote,” Khanna explained.
“These procedural blunders have massive implications for the American people, who deserve better from their elected officials. American workers deserve an explanation,” Khanna went on. “It will hurt the young folks organizing at Starbucks and the workers organizing at Amazon. It’s inexcusable and inexplicable that we did not prioritize confirming the NLRB appointees like we do federal judges and have ceded the Board two years before we needed to.”
Khanna also pointed out that Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had advanced McFerran’s confirmation at the beginning of August, giving Democrats plenty of time to reconfirm her.
Labor unions have denounced the failure to reconfirm McFerran. The AFL-CIO said the vote was not about McFerran or her qualifications, but about “reversing generations of progress workers have made toward building a fairer and more just economy.”
In recent years, there has been a massive groundswell of labor activity as organizers, especially young ones, have waged landmark unionization campaigns, spurring a historic upturn in union and labor activity, with union elections doubling throughout Joe Biden’s term. In this time, the labor board has made several major rulings tilting the scales back in favor of workers in an environment otherwise extremely hostile to workers’ rights.
Trump and his corporate and conservative allies have pledged to attack labor rights and defang the NLRB. Trump’s first term offered a preview of this; in 2020, for instance, the NLRB under Trump overturned a 70-year precedent that protected workers for occasional use of strong language.
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