Employers, Workers Brace for Fallout Over Nationwide Injunctions

The US Supreme Court’s decision limiting universal injunctions will immediately complicate ongoing federal workforce litigation while the downstream effects for broader labor and employment policy challenges play out.

The high court’s 6-3 ruling will likely muddle legal strategies for both employer and worker advocates, who have previously sought nationwide injunctions to halt enforcement of controversial executive orders and rules from both Republican and Democratic administrations.

They’ve been granted in a wide-swath of cases, from challenges to the Trump administration’s federal worker cuts and attacks on corporate diversity programs, to lawsuits attacking pro-employee Biden-era rules such as a ban on non-compete agreements.

In lieu of an expansive injunction, workers specifically could rely more on class actions to encompass a wider array of people alleging harm by an executive order or regulation, said Greg T. Rinckey, a partner at Tully Rinckey PLLC, who specializes in federal employment law. The court majority said pointedly that the “bill of peace” for the broad court pauses has “evolved into the modern class action.”

Civil servants, who have been a prime target of the administration’s efforts to significantly reduce the size and scope of the US government, are more likely to get their classes certified, Rinckey said.

“There’s a common defense,” he said. “They’re all employed by the federal government.”

Desirée LeClercq, an assistant law professor at the University of Georgia, said limits on universal injunctions will be a double-edged sword for businesses, adding that most of those orders granted during Democratic administrations favored corporate plaintiffs.

“I suspect this will be one of those cases that’s not going to play out the way conservatives think that it will,” LeClercq said. “This is for Trump, and not for employers.”

Worker Class Actions

This year alone, nationwide injunctions were issued in at least five federal cases challenging the Trump administration’s authority to cut government workers or dismantle agencies, according to Bloomberg Law data. Similar pauses have come from cases against President Donald Trump’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion executive order and the Labor Department’s efforts to dismantle Job Corps, a training program aimed at low-income young workers.

“I would anticipate that we will see a big uptick in the alternative path of trying to certify class actions,” said Sarah Konsky, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

Derick Dailey, a member of Crowell & Moring LLP’s litigation and trial group, said if nationwide injunctions become harder to obtain, plaintiffs can’t automatically switch to class actions because there are several procedural steps to overcome for litigation to be successful.

These include certification requirements, where lead plaintiffs must demonstrate that the legal or factual questions are common to the entire class and that the requested relief is appropriate for all members.

Outside of the context of federal workers, class-action injunctions won’t necessarily be enforceable nationwide under the court’s new standard, raising the specter of litigants facing conflicting legal obligations depending on their geographic location.

“This ruling just furthers this Supreme Court ultra-conservative, super-majority’s trend of creating a fractured legal system where everyone’s rights are determined by where they live, and whether they can afford to bring lawsuits instead, as protected by one Constitution,” said Alison Tanner, senior litigation counsel at the National Women’s Law Center.

Federal Workforce

For federal workers fighting the Trump administration, it’s unclear how the high court’s ruling will affect current litigation.

A senior union official, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, said the decision probably wouldn’t derail a case challenging Trump’s efforts to end collective bargaining rights for many federal workers. A coalition of unions this week secured a preliminary injunction blocking the president’s March executive order stripping federal-sector union rights.

The American Federation of Government Employees, one of the plaintiffs in that case, is representing its own interests in collectively bargaining with the government, the official said.

But it remains to be seen how the order would affect a broader challenge to Trump’s plans for mass agency layoffs, the official added. AFGE filed the case on behalf thousands of workers nationwide, and is joined by advocacy groups and municipalities, including Chicago, Baltimore, and San Francisco—creating a vast labyrinth of plaintiffs that a court might find hard to distinguish from a nationwide injunction.

Effect on Employers

Business representatives and red states have attempted to halt arguably worker-friendly rules to varying degrees of success. Several conservative states won a nationwide injunction in 2021 blocking a Biden-era federal contractor vaccine mandate. Other challenges, like one against a 2024 DOL overtime pay rule, saw limited injunctions.

While employers could look to class action litigation, it’s “not the way the device is typically used,” said Brian Wolfman, a law professor at Georgetown University.

The University of Georgia’s LeClercq said while individual employers can still request injunctive relief, they first need to go through the effort of bringing a case rather than relying on other businesses to challenge federal policy.

“Corporations have been acting increasingly solidaristic. During especially the Biden administration, they were acting in concert,” LeClercq said. “This kind of atomizes them.”

She added that the Supreme Court’s ruling, which suggested state attorneys general could still seek complete relief for businesses and workers in their states, may galvanize both employers and worker advocates to refocus on state action.

“This possibility that they could be the reprieve, the workaround, places a greater emphasis on state action than we had before, really pitting the states as the actors to countervail the president,” LeClercq said.

Some employers and their representatives have adopted legal strategies bypassing injunctions all together, though that means it would typically take longer to reach a merits decision upholding or striking down a rule or policy.

For example, a pair of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission policies, including abortion in its pregnancy bias rules and gender identity in its workforce harassment protections, were recently vacated without judges first granting nationwide injunctions. The rulings came more than a year after those measures were finalized.