Nowhere is America’s pioneering legacy more vivid than in Utah, where thousands of workers laid the tracks for the transcontinental railroad. That engineering marvel not only connected our coasts, but it also connected people, ideas, and industries. It was a triumph of vision, perseverance, and labor.
While that laboring spirit still drives Utahns today, it has been under threat from the National Labor Relations Board, the very federal agency whose mission it is to oversee labor practices. During the past several years, the NLRB has simply veered off the tracks.
Instead of protecting workers, it has chosen to protect union bosses. Instead of being driven by fairness, it has been driven by politics. Instead of serving the legacy of American labor, it has served partisan interests.
But it does not have to be this way.
WHEN WILL THE FTC FINALLY QUIT ITS ANTITRUST CRUSADE?
The Senate has an opportunity to restore balance and fairness by confirming President Donald Trump’s current nominees to the NLRB. This is not just about filling empty agency seats; it’s about ensuring the agency in charge of defending workers actually defends its workers.
This is because, under the Biden-era nominees, instead of carefully balancing the scales between employees and union leadership, they were tilted in favor of union leadership virtually every time.
Just one example demonstrates this problem. The Biden-era NLRB brazenly decided that unions could bypass secret-ballot elections and impose union representation without the workers’ consent. This decision simply ignored multiple Supreme Court cases that hold that workers have a right to a secret ballot. In America, secret ballots are part of our sacred tradition — whether it involves voting for the president or a local school board member. And when workers vote on something as important to their livelihood as unionizing, they deserve the same sacred privilege.
The fallout from this decision to deprive workers of secret ballots was swift and predictable. Employer-filed petitions responding to their employees’ decision to unionize surged 2,000% the following year — from 62 in 2023 to 489 in 2024. Clearly, that spike did not reflect American workers suddenly discovering hitherto unseen benefits of unionizing; it showed businesses and employees scrambling to find a way to preserve their right to vote.
The president’s NLRB nominees would restore the sacred right to a secret ballot, ensuring that union representation is earned, not imposed, and that workers have a choice.
Protecting workers’ choice is not just about ballots; it’s also about access to information as workers make that vital choice.
In another decision, the NLRB tried to completely shut down workplace dialogue by moving to ban so-called “captive audience” meetings, where employers learn about the pros and cons of unionization. For over 75 years, these meetings provided workers with the opportunity to hear multiple perspectives before they were asked to make a decision as critical as whether to unionize. But the NLRB simply shut down this dialogue altogether. Such silencing does not empower workers; it manipulates them and demeans them.
Whether you are a nurse, a builder, or a teacher, you deserve access to information about decisions that affect your livelihood, particularly a decision as crucial as whether unionizing makes sense for you. The president’s NLRB nominees understand that access to critical information is not coercion; it’s democracy in action.
To be clear, not every union manipulates its workers by taking advantage of the unequal playing field the NLRB created. Many of them, including the Teamsters, police associations, and skilled trade unions, have worked hard to earn their members’ trust by delivering real results: better wages, safer workplaces, and job training that strengthens entire communities. They truly represent the best of America’s labor tradition.
But others have become little more than large, garden-variety political operations. Groups such as the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union spend hundreds of millions of dollars on left-leaning campaigns while neglecting the workers whose dues fund those very efforts. As one union leader openly declared, “The road to the White House goes through our union halls.”
This may serve partisan interests, but it clearly does not serve workers. The president’s nominees would help end this cycle by making an NLRB that is actually neutral and not a fundraising arm of one political party.
To be clear, this delay has not only caused legal problems, but also economic problems.
While Congress delays, businesses have delayed hiring, causing a ripple through the economy. Workers have faced instability in places such as Utah, where the NLRB’s drawn-out handling of a 2024 WinCo Foods union vote left employees in limbo for months. Schedules shifted, pay discussions stalled, and both sides were frustrated by federal red tape. Again, this did not protect workers; it simply trapped them in a hamster wheel of bureaucracy.
Utah’s economy, which is arguably the strongest in the country, thrives on clarity and collaboration. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, rising wages, and an economy built on mutual trust between employers and employees. That is what a “worker-first” model looks like, and that is the direction to which the NLRB must return.
Federal agencies exist to enforce laws passed by Congress, not to invent new ones. The Biden-era NLRB blurred that line, substituting regulation for legislation, churning out more red tape, and abandoning fairness for partisanship. Trump’s nominees will restore the balance and discipline needed to repair the NLRB’s legitimacy and credibility with American workers.
They understand that the NLRB’s role is not to pick winners and losers, but to protect workers’ rights and uphold secret ballots, as well as ensure union accountability and that information is not hidden from workers. Confirming them would restore the constitutional guardrails that keep government honest and workplaces free.
DON’T LET WASHINGTON ERODE AMERICA’S VALUES: FREEDOM AND COMPETITION
Utahns know what it means to forge a destiny and lay down the tracks to spark innovation, invention, and connection. We have done it before, we are doing it now, and we will continue to do it as long as Washington bureaucrats get out of the way and let us put our workers first.
The Senate has a choice: it can preserve the legacy of American labor or let it be rewritten by Biden-era bureaucrats. Confirming Trump’s nominees would be a vote for the workers who built this country and the workers who will build its future.
Derek Brown is the attorney general of Utah.
