A federal court ruled that Donald Trump’s abrupt firing of a former senior official at the top US labor watchdog was illegal, and ordered that she be reinstated.
Gwynne Wilcox was the first member of the National Labor Relations Board to be removed by a US president since the board’s inception in 1935.
The framers of the US constitution “made clear that no one in our system of government was meant to be king – the President included – and not just in name only”, the judge Beryl A Howell, wrote in the ruling.
Howell presided over the hearing held on Wednesday on a motion for summary judgment in the District of Columbia. “The President does not have the authority to terminate members of the National Labor Relations Board at will, and his attempt to fire plaintiff from her position on the Board was a blatant violation of the law,” she wrote.
“A president who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the US Constitution,” wrote Howell.
Article II of the US Constitution outlines the executive powers and responsibilities of the president. Howell continued, “in our constitutional order, the president is tasked to be a conscientious custodian of the law, albeit an energetic one, to take care of effectuating his enumerated duties, including the laws enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the Judiciary”.
Wilcox filed the lawsuit early last month, alleging her removal was a “blatant violation” of the National Labor Relations Act, which stipulates that members of the board can only be removed for negligence or misconduct. Her removal left the board with only two members, lacking the quorum of at least three members required to rule on cases.
“I’m ready to get back to work,” said Wilcox after the hearing in a speech outside the courthouse today. “It’s not just about me, but I’m glad to be the face of this fight.”
Her attorney, Deepak Gupta, noted this was the beginning of a long fight.
Wilcox was confirmed by the Senate in September 2023, and set to serve until August 2028. She sought a declaratory judgment ruling her removal unlawful and an injunction to permit her to complete her appointed term.
The White House has defended her removal, and that of the NLRB general counsel, claiming that “these were far-left appointees with radical records of upending longstanding labor law, and they have no place as senior appointees in the Trump administration”.
During the hearing, Howell noted that in court, the Trump administration claimed the law prohibiting removal of board members was unconstitutional. Similar arguments have been made in recent lawsuits against the NLRB by SpaceX, Amazon and other employers in response to labor law enforcement actions pursued against the corporations.
Howell explained the US supreme court precedent of Humphrey’s Executor, a 1935 case in which the court ruled that a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission had been unlawfully removed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Former NLRB chairs and labor leaders criticized the removal of Wilcox, claiming it violated that precedent set by the supreme court, undermined the independence of the NLRB and in effect halted federal labor law enforcement in the US.
The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, held a rally in support of Wilcox outside the courthouse during Wednesday’s hearing.
“A week after taking office, President Trump effectively shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and jeopardized the NLRB’s independence by illegally firing Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the Board,” said the AFL-CIO.
