Biden Instantly Fires Trump-Appointed Anti-Worker Attorney
Source: Intelligencer
For anyone under the false impression that Donald Trump’s courtship of the white working class meant he would break with his party’s anti-union animus and employer favoritism, his nomination of Peter Robb as the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board should have been a rude awakening. To say Robb was a management-side labor lawyer is like saying Babe Ruth was a ballplayer: In 1981, he was the lead federal government attorney in the Reagan administration’s successful effort to break a strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. The administration then placed the strikers under a lifetime reemployment ban (lifted by Bill Clinton in 1993). As the most conspicuous government assault on workers’ rights since Calvin Coolidge broke the Boston police strike, the PATCO case was one of the great symbols of the new conservative hegemony in Washington that Reagan represented.
After this big moment, Robb went back to a legal career focused on representing employers against workers in a broad range of cases, as New York’s Sarah Jones observed: “Before he was general counsel, Robb once worked as a special labor counsel for Proskauer Rose, a notoriously anti-union law firm. Proskauer Rose attorneys have, at different points in the firm’s bleak history, represented Volkswagen, Columbia University, the NFL, and the NBA in battles with existing unions or organizing drives.”
But he happily resumed his Washington career of worker harassment and union busting when appointed by Trump, compiling quite a record — summarized by one critic who wrote an open letter to Biden asking that Robb be fired:
Robb’s NLRB sued Oregon over a law protecting workers from a common anti-union tactic used by employers. They also allowed a hotel to proceed with an unfair and questionably legal mass termination of employees after the pandemic hit this year. His office has employed faulty logic to deliberately make negotiating first contracts more difficult. For crying out loud, Mr. President-elect, Peter Robb has even gone after beloved picket line presence “Scabby the Rat.”
Read more: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/biden-fires-anti-worker-nlrb-attorney-peter-robb.html
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