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The president of the United States, Donald Trump, observes while signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, USA, on January 31, 2025.
Carlos Barria | Reuters
The former president of the National Board of Labor Relations in a New demand Wednesday accused president Donald Trump to break the law when he fired it from the agency last week.
Gwynne Wilcox lawyers argue that she was eliminated from its publication For a “political purpose” in a way that violates the 90 -year -old statute that established the NLRB.
His lawsuit In Washington, DC, the Federal Court seeks an order that restores it at the Board and declares that its dismissal was illegal.
Created by Congress to enforce US labor laws, NLRB is an independent agency with members of the Board isolated from arbitrary elimination. No NLRB member had been fired by a president, to Wilcox.
On Trump’s first day in office replaced Wilcox as president with another member of the Board. A week later, both Wilcox and the main NLRB lawyer, Jennifer Abruzzo, were fired in a “night email,” according to the demand.
That email said it was being fired because “the chiefs of agencies within the executive branch must share the objectives of the administration (of Trump).” Wilcox was appointed by former president Joe BidenA Democrat.
Demand calls this “a blatant political purpose that is facing the independent status of the NLRB.”
Wilcox argues that his dismissal made more than just violating the independence of the agency.
Effectively forced “an immediate and indefinite detainee” to all the regulatory activity of the NLRB.
At the time of Wilcox dismissal, there were already two vacancies in the five -member NLRB panel. Wilcox’s expulsion leaves only two remaining members in the boardMarvin Kaplan and David Pracy.
With only two of the five seats of the Board full, the NLRB does not meet the threshold of three members that it requires to continue operating.
Without a quorum of three, “there is no mechanism to solve labor disputes” in NLRB, Wilcox’s demand said.
This could be a positive development for the group of companies, including ELON ALMIZCLESpacex, Amazon and other giants, which have argued in a large number of demands that the structure of the Labor Board is unconstitutional.
A vocal opponent of labor unions, Musk was Trump’s greatest campaign donor. The billionaire currently serves as a “Special Government Employee“And the leader of the effort against Trump’s bureaucracy, known as Doge.
Musk and his lieutenants in Doge are carrying out an unprecedented effort to reduce federal expenditure, move through personnel agencies and offices and recommending that thousands of officials be reclassified and, in some cases, they say goodbye.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID on the wooden hanger,” Musk wrote on Monday X on Monday, referring to the United States Agency for International Development.
There is currently no Doge members registration visiting the NLRB or communicating with the agency. The NLRB declined to comment on Wilcox’s demand.
Wilcox’s demand also establishes a challenge about Trump’s scope, since he and his assistants, including Musk, quickly try to remodel and unilaterally reduce the size of the federal government.
“The president’s action against Mrs. Wilcox is part of a series of openly illegal shots in the first days of the second Trump administration that are apparently designed to prove the power of Congress to create independent agencies such as the Board,” wrote their lawyers In demand.
They added that Wilcox is aware that “if no challenge is made, the president will have effectively achieved” discourage the protections of long -standing labor law “and, by extension, that of other independent agencies.”
Wilcox swore as a NLRB member in August 2021, and was confirmed by the Senate in September 2023 for a second five -year term. December 17, Biden Wilcox designated chair of the board.
The lawsuit also pointed out that Wilcox was the “first black woman to serve on the board.”
The National Labor Relations Law of 1935 specifies that the President can only eliminate the members of the Board of the Agency in cases of “negligence of duty or embezzlement in office”, and only after this member receives a “notice and audience”.
Wilcox never received a notice and a hearing, according to his demand. And instead of identifying any negligence or embezzlement of Wilcox, the email noticing his removal allegedly cited Trump’s opinion that “the heads of agencies within the executive branch must share the objectives of (their) administration.”
