What SpaceX And Amazon’s Lawsuits Against The National Labor Relations Board Might Mean For Workers
The United States is fairly notorious worldwide for its relative lack of worker protections compared to other countries.
But after four years of expansion under the Biden administration, the U.S.’s paltry worker protections may be on the brink of extinction as business leaders aligned with the president-elect seek to make good on the threats they made against workers’ rights throughout the entire presidential campaign.
SpaceX, Amazon, and dozens of other companies are suing to have the National Labor Relations Board declared unconstitutional.
Project 2025, the right-wing’s stated agenda for the incoming Trump administration, has been sitting on the internet, readily readable, free of charge for an entire year.
Trump and many of his surrogates may have repeatedly disavowed it, but a simple Google search of the document’s authors, all of whom are closely allied to the president-elect, made this implausible from the start.
Regardless, now that he’s won, many of these same surrogates have gleefully admitted that Project 2025 was the plan all along. Included within its pages are explicit proposals to reshape the lives of the very working-class voters who led the incoming administration to victory, from repealing child labor laws and safety rules to attacking organizations like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Also included were explicit plans to dismantle most of the federal government’s regulatory bureaucracy as a whole, of which the NLRB is a part.
Tesla founder and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been placed in charge of this endeavor, so it’s no surprise that SpaceX is among several companies currently suing the NLRB over claims that the bureau’s efforts to protect workers and enforce labor laws are unconstitutional.
If the lawsuits prevail, workers will lose protections from unfair labor practices and their ability to organize.
If you are a person who works for a living and relies on a paycheck to get by, you need an organization like the NLRB in your corner. Not only do they protect and enforce what few rights you have as a worker and preserve your ability to participate in union activity, but they are also the entity to which you appeal for everything from pay discrepancies to harassment claims. They are also often heavily involved in lawsuits you bring against your employer.
It should come as no surprise then that corporations hate the NLRB, which they say unfairly targets corporations and overly aggressively defends workers. Amazon and SpaceX’s lawsuits are just two of more than two dozen challenges that have been filed recently alleging the NLRB’s power is tyrannically unchecked.
This is absurd on its face — there isn’t a corporation in America that is suffering, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single worker who feels that their pay and working conditions are unfairly generous. If these lawsuits prevail, it is likely that even the basic protections workers currently have will evaporate.
Jeff Bezos’ Amazon and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are themselves cases in point: The former is suing the NLRB for going after its union-busting activity, while the latter is suing because the NLRB followed up on complaints from employees who said they were fired for daring to speak ill of Musk.
The Biden Administration greatly expanded the NLRB’s enforcement of labor laws. Now, its future is in jeopardy.
The unprecedented union activity we’ve seen in the past couple of years — from artists in Hollywood to UPS and FedEx drivers to Starbucks baristas and Waffle House workers — is partly due to the ways the NLRB’s regulatory and enforcement activity was expanded under Biden’s NLRB appointee, General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo.
Abruzzo is sure to be immediately fired in January, just as Trump’s former appointee, pro-corporate labor attorney Peter Robb, was immediately fired in 2021 when Biden took office.
Who Abruzzo will be replaced with is anyone’s guess, but we can assume it will be someone similarly on the side of corporations, not workers — and that’s if the NLRB even survives the administration’s promised gutting of federal oversight bureaus.
State-level labor laws will still exist, of course — which is great if you live in a state that has them. But for those who don’t, a new post-NLRB world, or one where the NLRB’s protections are toothless under pro-corporate, pro-billionaire CEO leadership, will mean many workers will find themselves with no recourse if they are fired for exercising their right to free speech against their boss, to name just one of the myriad potential outcomes.
In short, employers will be free to take advantage of employees even more than they already do. Since it is the struggling and justifiably furious working class who sailed this administration to victory, the irony of all of this is bleak and bitter.
But it should not be in any way surprising because these plans were sitting in plain sight the entire time. Elections always have consequences, but those consequences magnify when you don’t bother to do any due diligence before walking into the voting booth.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
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