JANDOS ROTHSTEIN/AP PHOTO
The world’s two richest men: Elon Musk (right) and Jeff Bezos
This article appears in the February 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
On Wednesday, January 8th, even as firestorms wreaked havoc around Los Angeles, attorneys representing Amazon came to the federal courthouse in downtown L.A. to make clear that their client was still insisting on dismantling the only agency of government that enables private-sector workers to join unions and bargain collectively with their employers.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, his appointees to the National Labor Relations Board—a majority of the Board’s members and the agency’s general counsel—had strengthened workers’ rights to form unions and sought to penalize employers who illegally thwarted those rights, in a manner not seen since the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Vexed by the Board’s determination to resurrect the letter and spirit of the original pro-worker National Labor Relations Act, Amazon, as well as SpaceX and Starbucks, had all brought lawsuits during the past year arguing that the NLRB’s power to charge unions and employers for labor law violations and have administrative courts hold hearings and rule on those charges had suddenly become unconstitutional. This is a power upheld by the Supreme Court in 1937 that had gone unchallenged ever since.
Not coincidentally, beginning in 2022, both Amazon and Starbucks had seen workers at a number of their facilities vote to go union, the first time either company had experienced such an affront to their hitherto unchallenged power. (Though no major organizing campaign was under way at SpaceX, the Board did charge the company with two labor law violations over illegal firings, which was all it took to prompt CEO Elon Musk to file suit against the NLRB as well.) As is the norm for American employers, both Amazon and Starbucks have yet to sign contracts with any of their workers who voted to go union.
Amazon argues that its now three-year refusal to bargain with Staten Island warehouse workers who voted to unionize in early 2022 doesn’t violate the nation’s labor law. It also argues that its California, New York, Illinois, and Georgia delivery drivers who’ve voted to join the Teamsters—who deliver packages from Amazon warehouses, driving Amazon trucks, wearing Amazon uniforms, obeying Amazon’s productivity standards, and who are surveilled by Amazon cameras in their Amazon cabs—aren’t really Amazon employees, since Amazon franchises out its driving operations to third-party contracting companies.
The January 8th Los Angeles hearing was notable in that it was the first proceeding challenging the NLRB’s existence since the Senate had failed in December to confirm the renomination of Biden appointee Lauren McFerran to her post as NLRB chair. McFerran’s defeat meant that incoming president Donald Trump could immediately nominate McFerran’s successor, who would surely win confirmation in the newly Republican-controlled Senate and thereby give Republican and pro-employer members an NLRB majority.
Not coincidentally, beginning in 2022, both Amazon and Starbucks had seen workers at a number of their facilities vote to go union.
This means that the new Board will surely reverse several Biden Board rulings in short order. Like the one that had held the mega-companies that franchise out their work to contractors jointly responsible for labor law violations at those contractors, and for refusing to enter into bargaining with those franchised workers. Like the Cemex ruling, which compelled employers to begin bargaining with their workers when those employers had been found to have violated labor law and when a majority of those workers had affiliated with a union. Like the one that instructed Amazon to bargain with drivers at its Palmdale facility in northern L.A. County, who’d voted to join the Teamsters, to which Amazon had responded by dropping its contract with the contractor (who was the drivers’ nominal employer) and claiming it had no obligation to bargain with those workers.
But despite the impending 180-degree shift in the composition and posture of the NLRB, Amazon’s attorneys weren’t content to let the new Trump Board reverse its ruling on joint employers, or undo the increase in penalties employers face for their all-but-routine violations of labor law. In federal district court in Los Angeles (where the Palmdale case is being litigated), and in federal district court in Texas (where the Staten Island case is dubiously being litigated), the lawyers for the companies founded by the world’s two richest men—Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk—have persisted in their efforts to effectively abolish the only federal agency with the power to enable workers to have some say in their compensation and their conditions of work.
A word on the Texas lawsuit: Despite the fact that none of the Amazon warehouses whose workers and drivers have voted to go union are in or even near Texas, Amazon’s lawyers filed their suit in federal court there on the microscopically thin premise that of the roughly 8,000 workers at the Staten Island warehouse at the time they voted to go union, precisely four of them now reside in Texas. Of course, they really filed in Texas because federal district courts there, and in particular the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals there, are famously Neanderthal-style right-wing. The NLRB has filed to move the case to Washington, D.C.
Even though the combined wealth of Bezos and Musk now exceeds an almost incomprehensible half a trillion dollars, they have glimpsed spotty clouds on their earnings horizon. In 2024, Gallup put unions’ approval rating at 71 percent, while the share of Americans who had a “great deal” of confidence in big business stood at a bare 6 percent. Worse yet, the Biden NLRB was imposing actual penalties—like being compelled to enter bargaining—on employers who illegally threatened or fired workers seeking unionization. For years, the only penalty imposed on employers had been to reinstate the workers they’d illegally fired, fork over their back pay, and post a notice in the workplace saying they’d violated the NLRA, which is small potatoes when compared to having workers with whom they are actually compelled to bargain. And when Republicans controlled the NLRB, employers could often avoid even those mini-sanctions.
In federal court in San Antonio, Amazon’s attorneys have not contented themselves with simply contesting the constitutionality of the NLRB. They’ve also sought an injunction immediately forbidding the NLRB from issuing a final ruling on the cases brought against it, arguing that to do so suddenly constitutes “irreparable harm” against the company, despite the fact that NLRB rulings are not self-enforcing and that Amazon can appeal that ruling or any such ruling in federal courts, a process that can take months or even years.
Julie Gutman Dickinson, the attorney who represents the Teamsters in these proceedings, notes that Amazon had “brought 43 charges against the Teamsters and Amazon Labor Union [the union of the Staten Island warehouse workers, who later voted to affiliate with the Teamsters] before the Board. They consistently availed themselves of process”—until, apparently, they decided the one way they could ensure they’d prevail was to shut down the NLRB altogether. After almost 90 years during which the Board has ruled for and against employers and for and against workers, it suddenly became a matter of immediate urgency to shut the Board down through a court injunction.
Attorneys for both Bezos and Musk have likely calculated that the ferociously anti-union Sam Alito may be able to assemble enough of his Supreme Court colleagues to curtail at least some of the NLRB’s fundamental powers. They are doubtless also encouraged by the Court’s 6-3 decision last year to curtail the regulatory powers of federal agencies and leave it to the courts to determine which rules and regulations pass muster.
Whether or not Amazon gets its injunction, it can still press its case against the NLRB, just as SpaceX and Starbucks can press theirs. It’s not clear that Trump’s NLRB will continue to oppose those companies in court; if it chooses not to, the Teamsters (for the Amazon workers) and Workers United (for the Starbucks baristas) will continue to try to keep the NLRB up and running. As there’s no union involvement at SpaceX, however, Musk’s lawyers could continue unopposed if President Trump (or de facto President Musk) tells the NLRB to drop the case, and effectively, to drop out of sight.
