Washington (PAI) — President Donald Trump has nominated John Ring, a partner with the union-busting Philadelphia-based law firm Morgan Lewis and Bockius to the vacant fifth seat on the National Labor Relations Board.
A report by the AFL-CIO named the law firm as a top union buster. Ring heads the firm’s labor-management relations practice and openly admits he represents management interests. His nomination drew praise from top corporate lobbies.
The Chamber of Commerce said Ring’s confirmation would “open the door for the board to reconsider many other flawed rulings by the Obama NLRB.”
A prior AFL-CIO report, cited by workers at Harvard University when they first tried to unionize more than 20 years ago, named Morgan Lewis as one of the top five “union avoidance” firms in the U.S., a fancy name for union-busters.
Whether it still holds that rank is unknown. The Trump administration yanked an Obama Labor Department rule that would have forced union-busters to disclose more of their spending, and in more detail, just as the 1959 Landrum-Griffin Act forces unions to account for virtually every penny.
Ring’s law firm bio says he “represents management interests in collective bargaining, employee benefits, litigation, counseling, and litigation avoidance strategies. He has an extensive background negotiating and administering collective bargaining agreements, most notably in the context of workforce restructuring” – a euphemism for firings – “and multiemployer bargaining.”
If confirmed, Ring will join the five-member board as a solid pro-management vote, joining Trump’s nominees Marvin Kaplan and William Emanuel and Democratic members Mark Gaston Pearce and Lauren McFerran, giving the board a 3-2 Republican majority. It’s now tied 2-2.
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