UPDATED: President Trump Fires NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo
Many expected the firing to occur on Inauguration Day.
By Peter List, Editor | January 28, 2025
One week after his inauguration, President Trump has terminated Jennifer Abruzzo, the National Labor Relations Board’s General Counsel.
“Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, said she was fired via email late on Monday,” reported Bloomberg early Tuesday morning.
Unlike his predecessor, President Biden, who fired Trump’s appointed General Counsel Peter Robb on his first day in office, President Trump waited a week before terminating Ms. Abruzzo.
As Bloomberg reports:
While Abruzzo’s term was slated to last until July, her ouster by Trump was widely expected following Biden’s firing of Robb on Inauguration Day four years ago. The move clears the way for the new president to install a top NLRB attorney who may take a much more business-friendly approach to the role. Trump’s choice could determine what happens to the agency’s efforts to hold Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. liable for the treatment of subcontracted staff who the companies claim are not their employees.
….
Over her three and a half years on the job, Abruzzo prosecuted complaints against a slew of prominent US employers, including Starbucks Corp., Apple Inc., Tesla Inc., the New York Times Co., and the National Collegiate Athletics Association, which she accused of illegally misclassifying college athletes as non-employees. This month she issued a complaint against private prison company GEO Group Inc. alleging it used solitary confinement to retaliate against immigrant detainees who supported labor strikes. (The organizations have denied wrongdoing.)
Although litigants (primarily unions) may attempt to use the President’s termination to appeal their cases, in an ironic twist, Ms. Abruzzo successfully argued that Biden’s firing of her predecessor was lawful. Therefore, any challenge to Abruzzo’s termination would likely be met by the same legal arguments Abuzzo used to defend Biden’s termination of Peter Robb.
Read the rest of the Bloomberg article here.
UPDATE:
NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued the following statement on her last day at the National Labor Relations Board:
“It’s been the greatest honor and privilege to be General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board and to work alongside such talented and dedicated federal employees. We have accomplished so much through our robust education, protection, and enforcement efforts, including empowering workers to collectively seek improved wages, benefits and working conditions from their employers. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. So, if the Agency does not fully effectuate its Congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employer’s operations.”
