The 2026 NLRB Labor law changes are starting to ramp up in a big way.
The Senate is expected to confirm nominees James Macy and David Prouty soon, setting up a Republican majority at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to start reversing Biden-era rulings that tilted NLRB and labor law rulings toward unions, according to Bloomberg. Senate Republicans took the first steps last week to vote on a package of nearly 70 Trump administration nominees. The 12-page resolution covers President Trump’s picks for the NLRB, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the agencies that handle federal worker disputes.
The courts moved just as fast recently. Three separate labor law rulings landed inside one 48-hour window this week. None of them is a blockbuster by itself, but there is a larger story developing. The D.C. Circuit gutted a Board rule, a federal judge in New York halted a state’s workaround for a dysfunctional Board, and a House committee voted to rewrite who’s on the hook for a franchisee’s labor violations. On their own, each case is a solid update. Next to each other, they’re a pattern, and it points the same direction as the Senate confirmations: less room for the Board to operate on inferred authority.
D.C. Circuit rejects the NLRB successor bar rule
A divided D.C. Circuit panel ruled Tuesday in Hospital Menonita De Guayama, Inc. v. NLRB II that the Board overstepped when it required companies acquiring a unionized business to keep bargaining with the incumbent union for up to a year, whether or not the workforce still wanted that union around. The 2-1 majority leaned hard on Loper Bright to reject the Board’s reasoning. Loper Bright killed judicial deference to agency interpretations of fuzzy statutory language, and a rule the Board justified with policy logic instead of clear statutory text just got taken apart.
Federal court blocks New York’s NLRB trigger law
New York’s law letting its Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) step in during NLRB quorum gaps is preempted by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Judge Eric Komitee handed down that ruling Monday in the Eastern District of New York. (Yahoo) New York wasn’t inventing something new here. Several states passed similar “trigger laws” over the last couple of years, betting that if the NLRB couldn’t function, state boards could quietly pick up the slack. California’s version got enjoined back in December. New York’s is the second one down, and the pattern is getting hard to miss.
If your state passed one of these laws, keep an eye out. Federal courts keep striking them down.
American Franchise Act targets the joint-employer standard
The House Education and Workforce Committee passed the American Franchise Act 18-15 on Tuesday, straight down party lines. The bill would rewrite both the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) so franchisors are only on the hook for a franchisee’s wage or bargaining violations if they’re actually calling the shots on that franchisee’s staff. This goes straight after the joint-employer standard, which has been flipped back and forth by every administration for the better part of a decade. Franchise employers who’ve spent years absorbing legal exposure for locations they don’t run day to day would come out ahead. It heads to a full House vote next, and that committee margin suggests it won’t be a quiet one.
Republican majority could accelerate 2026 NLRB labor law changes
We are on the cusp of some long-awaited changes at the NLRB. Recently, courts have been chipping away at Board authority. A New York state law proposing a workaround for NLRB dysfunction got shut down. Congress moved to rewrite employer liability from the legislative side. All three happened inside the same 48 hours, right as the Senate lines up a new Republican majority at the Board itself. Expect more labor law changes favorable to employers as we move through the rest of the year, although employers should remain concerned about the Faster Labor Contracts Act (FLCA). Here is how you can weigh in on that overreaching bill.
