White House Nominates Marvin Kaplan for One of Two Vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board

The President earlier this week announced the nomination of Marvin Kaplan, who currently serves as counsel at the Occupational Safety and Health Commission, to serve as a Member of the National Labor Relations Board. Mr. Kaplan is a Republican and once confirmed, his taking a seat on the Board will be an important step in the move towards a more employer-friendly Republican majority that can be expected to reconsider many of the decisions of the Democratic majority Obama Board. Mr. Kaplan’s nomination is for the seat most recently held by Member Harry Johnson, and will be for a full five year term continuing into 2022.

The nomination is now before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, where it is expected to be advanced. Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee expressed his support, stating “Marvin Kaplan has the qualifications to be an effective member of the National Labor Relations Board. Once Mr. Kaplan’s nomination paperwork is received, the Senate labor committee will move promptly to consider his nomination.” It is not yet known however when that will occur.

As we reported last month, the President is also expected to nominate management side labor lawyer William Emanuel for the other vacant seat on the Board.

If President Trump’s nominees are confirmed by the Senate, the NLRB will have its first Republican majority in nine years.

As discussed in our earlier advisory, the board is likely to consider a number of significant legal issues once the vacancies are filled, including the NLRB’s test for determining whether joint employer relationships exist, the standards for evaluating whether handbooks and work rules interfere with employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA”), appropriate units for collective bargaining, the question of whether graduate students and research assistants are employees under the NLRA with the right to collective bargaining and a host of other decisions from the past eight years that more expansively interpreted the NLRA.