The post-Successor Bar fallout has begun:
Labor relations watchers have been curious about the aftereffects of Hospital Menonita de Guayama, Inc. v. NLRB, and more specifically, whether the contract bar would follow in the footsteps of the struck-down successor bar. This week, the NLRB made it known that it’s concerned about the case’s erosion of its rulemaking power.
In the above case, the D.C. Circuit found deference improper post-Loper Bright and took a narrower view of the Board’s rulemaking ability. The judges found that the NLRA does not grant the Board authority to create the successor bar, which required new employers to bargain with an inherited union for up to a year. The D.C. Circuit stressed how, following Loper Bright’s ending of Chevron, courts no longer generally defer to agencies, i.e., no longer accept that what the Board decides is reasonable labor policy.
Well, the Board’s new petition makes two claims: (1) that the D.C. Circuit improperly interpreted Loper Bright as ending judicial deference to agency policymaking; and (2) that the NLRA does provide statutory authority for it to create policy “subject to limited judicial review.” Stay tuned!
Nurses are picketing against AI throughout California:
We’ve previously discussed how physicians are embracing AI, but nurses don’t trust it, which is one reason why Big Labor has been compiling a model language library for contract bargaining. Clearly, unions have zeroed in on that pain point, given nurses’ worries about AI testing and oversight and whether this technology could be used as a band-aid for short staffing.
This week, California Nurses Association-National Nurses United (CNA-NNU) put Kaiser Permanente nurses on informational picket lines at 22 hospitals to express their concerns about AI rollouts.
NNU and other unions are bargaining for new Kaiser contracts that cover over 25,000 nurses, so don’t be surprised to see this friction move from informational pickets to a strike authorization vote. As anyone who’s been watching healthcare labor knows, unions don’t hesitate to carry out long walkouts against Kaiser that often have no meaningful results for workers.
In Q1 of this year at Kaiser, strikes racked up a cost of $1 billion.
California’s year with unions, by the numbers:
The Golden State and Big Labor’s love affair continues.
A report from the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and UC Berkeley Labor Center details the “State of the Unions” in 2025. California counted 100,000+ new union members with overall union density increasing to 16.7%, up from 16.3% in 2024. The state’s highest union density is 33% in the Los Angeles/Long Beach/Anaheim area, which is peppered with Hollywood trade unions including the Teamsters.
Additionally, the report shows that, of new units certified in 2024, around 50% had reached a contract by April 2026. That further confirms what labor watchers already knew, which is that first contracts don’t come easy. Yet as LRICS research has shown, stalled negotiations are not the cause of most decertification elections, unlike what lobbyists and lawmakers pushing the Faster Labor Contracts Act would have people believe.
Bargaining order standards are still very much in flux:
NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey’s recent guidance memo listed Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC as an overturning that she’d love to see when a relevant case reaches the Board.
It’s also understood that James Macy’s confirmation as the third GOP vote will probably make this overturning of the Abruzzo Board’s Cemex decision happen. In the meantime, some employers are still tied up in pending Cemex-related litigation. That’s the case for Las Vegas’ Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa, which asked the Supreme Court to pause a bargaining order issued by the D.C. Circuit in NP Red Rock LLC v. NLRB.
This is a tricky case where the court enforced the Board’s order for the employer to negotiate with the Culinary Union under both the Cemex and Gissel standards. The court didn’t touch the Cemex framework but affirmed a Gissel bargaining order, which is what Red Rock is asking to pause as it pursues Supreme Court review.
Previously, the Supreme Court declined to stay a similar request from the employer in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC v. NLRB after the Ninth Circuit affirmed a Gissel order issued by the Board.
A former union president’s $1 million fraud conviction:
The Justice Department (DOJ) announced the conviction of Kimberly Goodwin on eight counts of money laundering and participation in a wire fraud conspiracy. Goodwin, an ex-president of American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local 2419 in Maryland, siphoned almost $1 million in union funds to her own bank account even after she stepped down as a union officer in 2019.
In a DOJ statement, Department of Labor Inspector General Anthony P. D’Esposito declared that Goodwin had funneled “money to a sham consulting company for services that were never rendered.” Additionally, Goodwin had changed the AFGE local’s bylaws to grant herself illegal payments for work that she claimed to have done, even after the union stopped holding meetings in 2020 and ran out of funds in 2022.
Unsurprisingly, Goodwin used the stolen funds for lavish shopping sprees on the members’ dime. Her co-conspirator, ex-Secretary-Treasurer Kelleigh Williams, was convicted in 2025 for her role in the scheme.
