Apple Wins Fifth Circuit Challenge to US Labor Board Ruling (1)

Apple Inc. successfully challenged a National Labor Relations Board ruling that it violated federal labor law by coercively interrogating a worker and removing union literature from a break room.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the NLRB lacked substantial evidence for its finding that Apple committed those unfair labor practices at its World Trade Center store in Manhattan.

Apple appealed the NLRB’s ruling in the Fifth Circuit—known for its conservative judges and hostility to federal agencies—thanks to federal labor law’s loose jurisdictional rules for judicial review. The National Labor Relations Act allows companies to appeal board decisions in any circuit where they do business.

The case stems from an effort by the Communications Workers of America to organize Apple’s World Trade Center store, one of the union’s campaigns that failed to lead to a union election.

While the Fifth Circuit handed Apple a win, it declined to consider the company’s free speech argument that pushed for new legal standards that would have made it more difficult for the NLRB to police employers’ coercive questioning of employees.

The court said that it didn’t need to weigh whether a manager’s statements to a worker were protected by the First Amendment because they didn’t constitute illegal questioning.

The Fifth Circuit reached its ruling on the interrogation allegation by considering an eight-factor test from the Second Circuit’s 1964 ruling in Bourne v. NLRB, which are used to determine whether the questioning tends to be coercive.

“Taken as a whole, the circumstances do not support a finding of coercive interrogation—and the Board identifies no authority that compels the opposite result,” Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the three-judge panel. “The Board selectively invokes precedent focused on isolated factors, but none sustain a finding of coercion when viewed in full context.”

The NLRB also lacked the necessary support in the record to conclude that the company illegally removed union fliers from the break room, said panel, which included Judges Priscilla Richman, a George W. Bush appointee, and Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee.

Apple didn’t single out union material for removal, but instead fairly enforced its non-solicitation and housekeeping policies to remove all unattended written materials from the break room, the court said.

Douglas filed a concurring opinion saying she would reverse the NLRB’s ruling on the breakroom allegation based solely on the company enforcing its non-solicitation policy.

The NLRB declined to comment on the ruling. Apple’s lawyer, Michael Kenneally of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Communications Workers of America is affiliated with the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which represents employees of Bloomberg Law.

The case is Apple v. NLRB, 5th Cir., No. 24-60242, 7/7/25.