Labor Board Plucks ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ Since Quorum Restored

The National Labor Relations Board is attacking its massive backlog of cases by starting with short rulings that swiftly resolve the issue at hand and require little or no legal reasoning.

The NLRB has handed down 78 decisions since it regained its ability to decide cases six weeks ago, according to a Bloomberg Law review of cases through Tuesday. Only seven of those decisions featured legal analysis that’s binding in future cases, and none with reasoning that spans more than three pages in length.

“This is precisely what I would expect,” said Marvin Kaplan, a former NLRB chair during the second Trump administration. “The board has a lot of low-hanging fruit that it can deal with quickly, but the members still need to go through the cases to make sure they agree.”

The board is likely to continue issuing a high proportion of summary rulings for next few months—if not the whole year—as it efficiently moves through the backlog of cases that piled up during most of 2025, said Kaplan, now an attorney at Jackson Lewis PC.

The initial batch of decisions involved the NLRB saying “no” a lot. Nearly half of the board’s rulings featured the denial of a request to review a regional director’s decision or to revoke a subpoena.

Still, the NLRB granted four requests to send cases back to regional directors to allow for the parties to settle their disputes. The board rejected a fifth bid in one of the rulings with binding legal analysis, finding that the settlement deal at issue was inadequate.

The NLRB lost its operating quorum in January 2025 because President Donald Trump fired a board member for the first time in the agency’s history. Trump took six months to name nominees for NLRB seats that were already vacant when he was inaugurated. The Republican-controlled Senate took five months to confirm members James Murphy and Scott Mayer, who had to wait nearly three more weeks to be sworn in.

The agency continued to operate during the nearly year-long stretch when it the NLRB couldn’t issue rulings, in part through board authority that was delegated to other officials. But many cases—500 as of October, according to Murphy’s congressional testimony—stacked up in a backlog awaiting resolution by the board.

Sending Signals

The NLRB has taken a smart approach in the cases it’s targeted, including those that remained unresolved simply because the board lacked a quorum, said Lauren McFerran, a former NLRB chair during the Biden administration.

Fifteen of the newly revived board’s first 28 rulings adopted administrative law judge orders that weren’t challenged by either the charged party or the general counsel’s office. Starbucks Corp., the Washington Post, and the US Postal Service were involved in some of those cases.

The board also handed down a half-dozen default judgments against employers in unfair labor practice cases. The general counsel’s office seeks such orders when a charged party doesn’t respond to the allegations in a complaint within two weeks after it’s filed against them.

“The board is also taking care of some housekeeping matters that send signals to the bar—both the labor bar and management bar alike—about what arguments aren’t going to get any traction,” said McFerran. “That’s a good efficiency mechanism for the board to say, ‘Don’t make these arguments, they’re not worth your time.’”

McFerran cited as an example the NLRB’s trio of rulings that deferred to a 2024 decision by the National Mediation Board finding that it has jurisdiction over air carriers and not their contractors. The NLRB in those three cases rejected employer bids to have the cases transferred to the NMB for jurisdiction determinations.

Real Consequences

Although the NLRB’s actions this year haven’t had broad impact, each individual ruling is significant for the parties involved.

For example, the board denied Trader Joe’s request to review a regional director’s certification of a union election win and a decision that rejected the company’s challenge to the vote.

The election took place in January 2023. Trader Joe’s and the union finished briefing the company’s request for review in February 2024. The company’s petition included allegations of misconduct by a lawyer for Trader Joe’s United, Seth Goldstein of Goldstein & Singla PLLC.

“I was heartened that it was denied by a Trump board,” Goldstein said. “In a time that’s difficult for unions, the decision was a bright spot.”

Goldstein said he filed another letter demanding that Trader Joe’s bargain with the union following the board’s ruling.

Trader Joe’s lawyer, Christopher Murphy of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, declined to comment on whether the company will negotiate with the union or challenge the election in federal court.