The National Labor Relations Board is asking Congress for more money in the government’s next spending bill, but there is nothing to suggest that additional funding would help the agency better serve employees and job creators.
In an effort to appeal to lawmakers, NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo complained on Twitter that the agency is “facing a $20 million shortfall.” If its budget isn’t expanded, she said, “the agency will likely have to furlough staff.”
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But what the NLRB needs isn’t more money — it’s new priorities.
In its 2023 budget request submitted to Congress, the NLRB said it wants to hire 41 new full-time employees to “expand crucial outreach activities in underserved communities.”
The NLRB request also cited a White House Worker Organizing and Empowerment Task Force report, which laid out “nearly 70 recommendations to promote worker organizing and collective bargaining.” The agency said the White House is “depending on the NLRB to play a key role in this effort.”
In addition, the NLRB said it wants eight new full-time employees to “strengthen inter-agency collaboration and coordination in support of the Executive Order on worker organizing & empowerment.” This follows a memorandum the agency released in July with the Federal Trade Commission, laying out a strategy for how the two regulatory agencies might work in tandem to target the gig economy.
These are not priorities the NLRB should be pursuing, and Congress should not give the agency financial cover to push an agenda that could hurt workers far more than it helps.
Moreover, the NLRB’s financial situation is not nearly as dire as it’s claimed. On social media and in correspondence to Congress, the NLRB paints a picture of a significantly increased workload, a backlog of cases, and a bureaucracy stretched so thin it may need to have furloughs. But the agency’s own numbers tell a different story.
In fiscal 2022, the NLRB had 17,998 unfair labor practice filings, which are allegations of federal labor law violations, and 2,383 representation case filings for both unionization elections and union decertifications. This added up to a caseload of 20,381 cases.
That is up from 17,523 cases in fiscal 2020 and 16,590 cases in fiscal 2021. But it is down from every previous year before that going back to at least 2013. For instance, fiscal 2019 saw 20,508 cases and fiscal 2013 saw 23,852 total cases.
Still, even as the NLRB is claiming it does not have the resources to carry out its mission, Abruzzo through a series of memos has instructed the agency to pursue legal theories that take time to research instead of letting staffers simply enforce agreed-upon law. For instance, she issued a memo telling agents to guard against “unlawful threats and coercive activity” by employers, which sounds reasonable until one considers that Abruzzo views employee meetings on unionization, mandatory companywide meetings to discuss unionization where employees are fully compensated for their time, as borderline coercive.
The NLRB could also cut down on the use of official time. Official time is when union workers are paid their taxpayer-funded salaries to do union work rather than the government jobs they were hired to do.
A study of the Office of Personnel Management for fiscal 2019, for example, found that 4.87% of all the hours NLRB employees log go toward official time. This was down significantly from 2016’s 6.72% of hours but has likely increased since President Joe Biden revoked the Trump administration’s curtailment of the practice.
Reducing the use of official time could lead to significant savings for the agency to use elsewhere. It also could help with the 4.6% federal pay increase the NLRB is also using to try to justify the increased budget.
The NLRB’s request for an increased budget will not yield better services for workers and job creators. Instead of focusing on rewriting labor law, reaching out to union organizers, or coordinating with other agencies to punish job creators, the NLRB should live within its means.
It could start by cutting back on expenses that do not help taxpayers, such as official time.
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Mike Braun is a senator for Indiana who serves on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. F. Vincent Vernuccio is president of the Institute for the American Worker and a senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
