The lawyer who helped these staff get their jobs again this previous yr is Jennifer Abruzzo, 58, normal counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, the company tasked with defending staff’ rights to prepare within the United States.
Abruzzo has labored on the NLRB for almost a quarter-century. But now, because the company’s chief and chief enforcer of federal labor legal guidelines, she desires to make it far simpler for staff to unionize than it has been in a long time. Her tenure comes at a pivotal second for unions. Union membership has fallen over the previous 4 a long time, however pandemic-era pressures that prompted thousands and thousands of staff to retire or depart the workforce have additionally afforded staff new leverage to demand extra from their employers. Union elections elevated by 53 percent in fiscal yr 2022 over 2021.
In a little over a yr on the job, the President Biden appointee has grow to be a family identify all through organized labor for reshaping the company in new methods. In memos, she’s directed roughly 500 employees attorneys to invoke a not often used authorized device to assist union supporters return to work after retaliatory firings. She’s directed them to impose harsher penalties on employers who violate labor legislation and dusted off a decades-old legal doctrine that would halt employers’ anti-union campaigns.
“I’ve been with the agency for a very long time for a reason,” Abruzzo instructed The Washington Post. “I wanted to try and make a difference in workers’ lives. As I’ve gotten positions with more responsibilities, I was able to effectuate what I believe is our congressional mandate, which is to protect workers’ rights. We’re not pro union. We’re not pro employer. We are pro worker. That’s the lens from which I view my job.”
Abruzzo is additionally Biden’s finest probability at attaining his aim to be the most pro-labor president in US history. At a time when Congress is so narrowly divided that Biden has but to ship on some main labor priorities, together with a bundle of measures that might reinforce stronger union rights and enshrine them into legislation, Abruzzo’s NLRB may make it tougher for corporations like Starbucks and Amazon to combat union campaigns.
“You have a president who is unabashedly and unapologetically supportive of workers’ rights, and I think Jennifer has been given permission to pursue the issues that people around the labor movement have been advocating for over a long time,” stated Seth Harris, former prime labor adviser to Biden. “Jennifer understood the power of these issues and decided she’s going to try to solve the problems that we’ve all been wringing our hands over for years.”
In the meantime, Abruzzo has additionally earned the ire of conservatives, together with the editorial web page of The Wall Street Journal, which declared that she intends to “turn the labor board into a spear for unions against employers.”
And attorneys who symbolize employers have described Abruzzo’s proposals as additional left than her predecessors below Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. For instance, Abruzzo argued in a memo in April that employer-led “captive audience” conferences that stress staff in opposition to unionizing violate labor legislation. Her critics disagree and say she is infringing on employers’ free speech rights.
“At least with some of my colleagues, there’s surprise and shock about how much the pendulum is swinging back. With some of the agenda items, we’re like, ‘Holy smokes, this is pretty radical,’ ” stated James Plunkett, an lawyer at Ogletree Deakins, a legislation agency that has represented Amazon and different giant employers.
Abruzzo maintains her prime precedence is defending staff. And on the problem of captive audiences particularly, she stated she desires to make sure “those meetings are voluntary … because workers have a right to refrain from listening to [that] rhetoric.”
Abruzzo grew up in Jackson Heights in Queens. Her father was a union engineer at a utility firm and her mom was an X-ray technician and member of Service Employees International Union Local 1199, one of the town’s strongest unions. “We didn’t have a lot,” Abruzzo remembers. She bought her first job serving to at a heart specialist’s workplace at age 13.
She credit her mother and father for educating her to face up for what she believed in. In the Nineteen Eighties, as a highschooler, Abruzzo knocked on the Manhattan entrance door of former president Richard Nixon, she stated, and confronted him in his lobby about statements he had made on nationwide tv concerning the ethical failings of her technology. He apologized to her.
Abruzzo married younger and had her first and solely little one at age 23, following her partner to Florida. They divorced after a few years, and Abruzzo put herself by means of legislation college night time courses as a single mother. Labor legislation professor Michael Fischl took discover of Abruzzo as “a standout” in his class and urged her to use for a job on the Miami places of work of the National Labor Relations Board.
Abruzzo has largely labored on the company ever since. She spent 11 years within the Miami discipline workplace, advising staff about their labor rights and helping them in submitting for union elections. But she’s additionally served as a political appointee below the Obama administration, as deputy normal counsel.
“I interacted with workers from all walks of life. [Miami] was a very large melting pot,” Abruzzo stated. “But you’d hear the same sort of workplace concerns, whether it was about inadequate wages or inequities in the workplace or retaliation. That experience actually cemented for me the need to be available for workers whenever and wherever they needed us.”
Former leaders on the NLRB credit score her years of expertise for uniquely positioning her to remodel the company into a champion for staff. Abruzzo is distinguished from many of her predecessors as a result of she spent a lot time on the company, particularly its discipline places of work.
Past colleagues described her as a extremely environment friendly and energetic chief. She expects employees attorneys to be as nicely ready as she is for conferences. She additionally is recognized for taking a particular curiosity in younger legal professionals.
Nearly each colleague interviewed credited her for being a good pal who plans birthday events and retirements dinners and checks in over e mail and telephone calls, serving to all attorneys, regardless of politics, alter to life in Washington.
During the Obama administration, Abruzzo invited new NLRB board appointees over to her home in Virginia. Often her husband, an Italian cookbook writer, led pasta-making classes. Guests included Harry Johnson, a well-known Republican lawyer with Morgan Lewis, who went on to assist Amazon oppose a contentious union marketing campaign in Bessemer, Ala., in 2021. She additionally hosted Philip Miscimarra, the Trump-appointed NLRB board chair, additionally with Morgan Lewis, who has represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“For Jen, it’s hard to know where work begins and ends,” stated Celine McNicholas, an Obama-era NLRB lawyer and a shut pal of Abruzzo’s. “Work is her life, but I think she makes everyone around her feel like part of her family.”
The NLRB made headlines when Biden first took workplace as a result of he had taken the extraordinary step — on his first day in workplace — of firing Abruzzo’s predecessor, Peter Robb, a Trump appointee, who was despised by labor unions and refused to resign when requested.
Later that summer time, Abruzzo was sworn in to run the NLRB, 16 months into the pandemic. The vaccine was being distributed however covid was nonetheless raging and the Delta variant was about to take maintain. Millions of staff had began quitting their jobs in search of higher alternatives. In the months surrounding Abruzzo’s swearing-in, strikes broke out at Frito-Lay, Nabisco and John Deere, and popular support for labor unions had reached the very best level since 1965.
Sitting in a nook workplace overlooking the Washington Navy Yard, Abruzzo has fired off some 11 authorized memos, almost double her predecessor’s output over a comparable interval.
She goals to reverse a host of Trump-era decisions. She desires the NLRB to overturn a measure that stops union organizers from accessing firm property, and one other that bans staff from organizing on firm e mail. But she additionally desires to go additional.
She has requested that employees attorneys sharpen financial penalties in opposition to employers that illegally fireplace workers for union exercise. In the previous, employers have been required to offer again pay, however she says that they need to be held accountable for bills staff accrue whereas unemployed, resembling health-care insurance coverage, loans, bank card late charges and even misplaced properties or automobiles. She has requested company officers to require employers to pay unions for bills they incur combating unlawful anti-union exercise. She has additionally argued that college students athletes, resembling soccer gamers at Northwestern University, who generate thousands and thousands of {dollars} in revenue for schools, ought to be capable to unionize.
In maybe her boldest proposal, Abruzzo desires to revive a mid-Twentieth-century doctrine, generally known as “Joy Silk.” The commonplace would power employers who violate labor legislation to acknowledge unions with out a secret-ballot election, if most of a workforce has indicated curiosity in unionizing by signing union authorization playing cards. The doctrine was deserted by the board in 1969.
“Back when Joy Silk was the law of the land, there were about 6,000 to 8,000 union elections a year. Now there’s about 2,000,” stated Brian Petruska, a union lawyer who has written extensively about Joy Silk.
Employers have balked on the concept of Joy Silk returning, saying it could shortcut the union marketing campaign course of and fail to offer staff sufficient alternative to make an knowledgeable, personal choice about whether or not they wish to unionize.
Abruzzo is additionally coordinating with to different federal companies and has met a number of occasions with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has vowed to rein within the energy of Big Tech. Abruzzo stated these partnerships have allowed the companies to sort out sophisticated office points, particularly the misclassification of gig staff as impartial contractors.
But there are limits to what Abruzzo can accomplish throughout her five-year time period, which fits by means of July 2025. The company’s funds has been given no new funding in 9 years. It has misplaced 50 percent of its field staff since 2002, that means staffers have greater caseloads and aggrieved staff wait longer to obtain aid, board officers stated. The velocity at which the board operates will be important for the success of union elections, labor organizers stated.
“Abruzzo is doing an amazing job and has this ambitious agenda but she just does not have the resources to execute it, and that’s because Democrats have not made this a priority in government funding bills. That needs to change,” stated one senior congressional Democratic aide, talking on the situation of anonymity to explain personal dynamics. “We’re gearing up to make this a fight in the coming months.”
Labor organizers say the five-person NLRB panel that guidelines on instances Abruzzo has chosen is transferring at a frustratingly sluggish tempo, regardless of its Democratic majority. They level to the quantity of time it has taken to reverse Trump-era union election guidelines.
Abruzzo is undeterred and factors to renewed reputation in unions and the NLRB. She credit staff themselves, and labor leaders resembling Christian Smalls, the chief of the impartial union that received the primary election at an Amazon warehouse in April.
“Chris Smalls said that the hardest part of unionizing was convincing his colleagues they had the right to organize, that there was an agency out there that would protect them,” Abruzzo stated. “He told them, ‘No, you have a right to do this. They can’t fire you.’ I appreciate that he was an ambassador for our agency.”
Jeff Stein contributed to this report.