The Supreme Court declined to take up challenges to the National Labor Relations Board’s Cemex decision and Trump’s termination of NLRB Member Wilcox.
SCOTUS lets Cemex stand: The Supreme Court declined—again—to take up a challenge to the Biden-era NLRB’s Cemex standard, under which unions can gain representation of employees without an election. The Court had previously rejected multiple other bids by Cemex (the employer in the original case) to overturn the Board’s decision and the Ninth Circuit’s upholding of the same.
Why it matters: The signature and most radical policy change of the Biden-era Board remains largely intact despite dozens of legal challenges and an expectation that the current Board will eventually ditch it.
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The exception: the Sixth Circuit invalidated the Cemex standard in a case earlier this year; that ruling, however, applies only to its jurisdiction: Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Even so, a looming circuit split on Cemex has still not yet moved the Supreme Court to review the decision.
NLRB termination saga over: In another NLRB/SCOTUS development, the Court let stand President Trump’s termination of Member Wilcox, declining to review Wilcox’s challenge to a D.C. Circuit decision that upheld her firing.
Why it matters: The unsurprising denial of review suggests that the Court interprets its own recent ruling regarding the President’s authority to fire certain agency heads as applying to the NLRB as well. Expect future Presidents to reshape the Board to align with their own political interests immediately upon taking office, with potential significant consequences for the regulatory environment facing employers.
