Here are the highlights of what you missed if you weren’t one of the nearly seventy attendees on our August Labor Community Briefing call. Want the full analysis, the data behind these headlines, and the chance to ask questions in real time? Join us on the next call.

The NLRB finally has a working quorum. The Board now stands at four confirmed members, Chair James Murphy, Scott Mayer, James Macy, and David Prouty, with one Democratic seat still open. Macy’s confirmation delivers the 3-1 Republican majority needed by tradition to start reversing precedent, and GC Crystal Carey has already published her wish list. Near the top: McLaren Macomb (severance agreement confidentiality), Stericycle (handbook scrutiny), and the Amazon captive audience meeting ban, all cases she wants to see overturned as new vehicles work their way up. Separately, Carey reports the ULP backlog is more than half cleared, down from 9,247 pending cases in January.

In Hospital Menonita de Guayama v. NLRB, the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Board never had statutory authority to create the successor bar, the rule that forced new business owners to keep bargaining with an inherited union for up to a year regardless of actual employee support. The court leaned on post-Loper Bright reasoning: no more automatic deference to whatever the Board decides is reasonable policy. It left the contract bar alone for now, pointing to Auciello Iron Works as a narrower, rebuttable presumption rather than an absolute bar, but the same statutory logic that killed the successor bar could reach it in a future case.

Harvard’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy, whose authors include former Biden NLRB GC Jennifer Abruzzo, published model state laws designed to push entire industries into sectoral bargaining through new State Labor Standards Boards empowered to mandate wage floors and certify unions to bargain against whole employer associations. Lobbying is already underway in Illinois and Minnesota. Meanwhile, the gig driver organizing trend keeps advancing: Massachusetts certified the SEIU-backed App Drivers Union, and California is set to certify its own Gig Workers Union. Drivers stay classified as independent contractors but get bound to a union constitution regardless, paying dues while losing the freedoms that come with contractor status.

SWU announced another boycott on August 26 with details still pending, even as strike activity has largely died down outside a single one-day action in Nashville. Current demands remain $17 an hour, more staffing, and workplace protections, still with no first contract more than four and a half years after the first store organized. There are early signs the NLRB tide may be turning: since 2024 the Board has ruled against Starbucks three times, but an August 5 decision reversed an ALJ ruling that had favored the union over a manager’s answer to a shift-borrowing question. Decertification activity continues to build too, with two more petitions filed in August, though none of the roughly 46 filed against SWU to date have actually reached an election.

Federal monitor Neil Barofsky flagged an unmet 2021 budget request, arguing a formal budgeting process is needed to fully move past the union’s troubled history; Fain blames Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock, who says leadership denied her proposals. Barofsky himself has now been subpoenaed as part of a lingering grand jury probe tied to his many reports on Fain’s spending and retaliatory firings of two officers. Three former UAW presidents have already endorsed Tricia Geiger for the union’s next election, and current VP Rich Boyer is running as well.

•  Corewell Health East reached a first contract after two years, covering roughly 10,000 Teamster-represented nurses across nine hospitals and dozens of clinics, with 15% raises over three years.

•  The Henry Ford Genesys strike is approaching its one-year anniversary, with about 750 nurses and case workers still out as part of the Teamsters’ broader push to organize Michigan RNs.

•  SEIU’s five-day strike at Nittany Medical Center cost the hospital over $6 million and contributed to its first operating loss in a decade, after which the hospital lowered its wage offer rather than raised it.

•  Labor peace agreements keep spreading through cannabis licensing in at least 8 states, but courts in New Jersey and Oregon have separately ruled that the NLRA preempts these state mandates.

•  LRI Institute pilot weeks are scheduled for November 9 to 13 (Campaign Preparedness) and November 16 to 20 (Contract Administration). Learn more →