NLRB Has 17,000 Open Unfair Labor Cases, Operations Chief Says

The National Labor Relations Board has approximately 17,000 open unfair labor practice investigations on hand, including almost 10,000 cases that have been pending review for more than six months, according to an agency official.

The NLRB typically processes 20,000 ULP cases per year, meaning that clearing those lingering cases represents half of the year’s production, NLRB operations division chief William Cowen said Tuesday at an American Bar Association conference in Hawaii.

“We have to slog through 10,000 new cases that are over six months old and a total of over 17,000 open investigations, and we need everyone’s help,” Cowen said to the labor lawyers attending the conference.

Cowen underscored the scope of the backlog faced by the NLRB’s regional offices, even as he spoke about new initiatives to address the piled-up work. Cowen, who served as acting general counsel during 2025, began heading the department that oversees regional offices shortly after Crystal Carey took over as general counsel in January.

The agency’s adoption of a new protocol for docketing unfair labor practice cases was the “most dramatic change” enacted, Cowen said. That system calls for new charges to go to an unassigned case list until a regional staffer is available to handle it.

One of the benefits of the docketing systems is how it allows the agency to “channel resources” so cases can be assigned to the personnel best qualified to handle them, based on skill and experience, he said.

The field offices need to “revitalize central processing” of union election cases, particularly writing decisions that resolve things like unit composition or supervisory status, Cowen said. That involves taking reassigning some staffers in the regions—and personnel from the agency’s headquarters if available—to pen some of those rulings.

The NLRB will do more “load balancing” across regions, so that work from the regional offices that have the deepest backlogs is sent to those that aren’t as overloaded, he said. Teleworking during the pandemic demonstrated that the agency can handle things remotely.

“That kind of stuff is going to happen,” Cowen said. “It’s not tomorrow, but it’s in the works.”

The agency is also considering whether it can reduce the number of affidavits it takes when investigating cases because they may not be necessary and they consume a lot of resources, he said.

Being judicious in the face of limited resources is what drove the general counsel’s recent guidance memo telling regions to dial back how aggressively they pursue allegations of unlawful employer rules, the operations chief said.

Cowen recognized that the agency’s understaffed—losing 200 employees to attrition, twice as many as the White House required under its agency downsizing operation—but said that it just needs to deal with that challenge.

“I do not want to preside over the end of the National Labor Relations Board, that’s not my goal,” he said. “My goal is to keep us on track.”