Pittsburgh unions prepare for life with gutted NLRB under Trump

Technical.ly partnered with PublicSource to explore the landscape of work in Pittsburgh — famed for its industriousness and intense union-management conflict and collaboration — as it is pressure-tested by changes in governmental policy, technology and economics.

When Cas Borowitz started as a Starbucks worker in Philadelphia, she said she received almost no training and watched a supportive colleague endure retaliation and transfer to another store after confronting a manager. 

That was around the time the first Starbucks store in Buffalo voted to form a union in 2021, igniting a major push to organize at locations of the ubiquitous coffee chain, including at Pittsburgh locations. Borowitz got involved in the union, Starbucks Workers United, and today serves as a part-time organizer while working as a shift supervisor at a Starbucks location in Pittsburgh. In recent months she played a role in a Bethel Park Starbucks’ successful union election, the 19th unionized location in the Pittsburgh area.

The Starbucks union push was part of an uptick in union organizing activity in the United States during the years of President Joe Biden’s administration. Many observers describe it as one of the most strongly pro-union administrations in decades, fueled by the former president’s picks to sit on and chair the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The NLRB made rulings in favor of Pittsburgh unions at various times over the last four years, including high-profile cases involving Starbucks workers who were deemed unlawfully fired and newspaper workers who are engaged in a historic strike. 

Now, President Donald Trump has ground the agency to a halt, dismissing its general counsel and firing one of its board members, a move that critics say is illegal and is likely to set up a battle in court. With the firing of board member Gwynne Wilcox, the board is left with just two of its five seats filled, short of a quorum required to make many decisions.

The White House did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the legality of the firing or if the president plans to appoint new members to the board.

“I don’t think [Trump’s second term] is going to be very good” for labor, said Joe Pass, a prominent Pittsburgh labor attorney who represents, among others, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers who have been on strike for more than two years. During Trump’s first term, “He put in  extreme right-wingers that curtailed a lot of the gains that had been gotten over the years.”

Chilling effect

In 2022, the NLRB, with a Democratic, pro-union majority, ordered Starbucks to reinstate four Pittsburgh-area baristas who supported the unionization effort. That’s the type of decision that could be stalled in the Trump era, according to the legal analysis site NLRB Edge, because without a quorum, the NLRB can’t rule on requests for appeal.

Even if one of the NLRB’s administrative law judges rules against a company such as Starbucks, the company could appeal that decision to the board — where it could languish indefinitely due to the lack of seated board members.

Union elections, which are the process for forming new unions, could continue as usual because they are administered by regional NLRB offices, not the national board. But Pass said the board won’t be able to rule on challenges to election results brought by either side, effectively delaying recognition indefinitely.

“It’s going to hurt more than anyone those who are seeking representation because employers are going to play them like a fiddle,” Pass said. “They can continue to refuse and wait for the board to enforce it, and the board isn’t there to enforce anything.”

Borowitz said at least one of the four rehired Starbucks employees has still not received their back pay, a matter which is now frozen because the NLRB is effectively paralyzed.

Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment. The company has touted its universal employee training program and recently entered into mediation with the union representing some 10,000 baristas after that union and the company withdrew lawsuits against each other.

Lou Martin, a labor historian and professor at Chatham University, said the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 that created the NLRB has relatively broad language, allowing presidents discretion to decide what the board will emphasize. 

“Every administration has an opportunity to interpret the law slightly differently,” Martin said. “This can include things like who’s eligible to be a union member, what constitutes an unfair labor practice and how vigorously they’re going to defend workers’ rights.”

Martin said the success of the labor movement has been loosely tied to the composition of the NLRB over the years, with a long decline in union membership starting around when Ronald Reagan became the first president to install NLRB members who were antagonistic toward unions. 

By contrast, Martin said, there was a “huge upsurge” in unionization drives and successful strikes under Biden. 

NLRB data shows the number of union petitions filed was around 2,000 in 2016, the year before Trump first took office. It dipped to 1,440 by the end of his term in 2020, a drop of almost a third. It remained low in 2021 but jumped above 2,300 by the end of Biden’s term in 2024. The number of elections won by unions was almost double in 2024 compared to 2020.

Martin is on the union organizing committee for Chatham’s faculty, which halted its own union effort after Trump prevailed in the November election. 

“It was clear to us and our attorneys that Trump’s appointees would not be supportive of our efforts to get collective bargaining rights,” Martin said. “We realized the prudent thing to do was to withdraw the petition. … If they rule against you, it can be very damaging, not just for us but for other workers in our situation.”

Martin said the case is evidence of the “chilling effect” a hostile NLRB has on labor organizing and he suspects other nascent unions pulled back after Trump’s election as the Chatham faculty did.

“It’s not that unions live and die by the NLRB, but it more makes a difference around the margins, where workers might be more precarious or they maybe had not had a history of being in unions,” Martin said.

Newspaper strikers lose ally

Employees of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are engaged in the longest-running strike in the country, picketing the newspaper since October 2022. They went on strike after management unilaterally raised health care costs and cut other benefits, and the union said the company failed to bargain in good faith. The workers have been without a contract for seven years.

A spokesperson for the Post-Gazette declined to comment, and its attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.

The strike began in the middle of the Biden administration, and, though many picketers have returned to work for the company, the strikers have been boosted by several favorable NLRB decisions. Most recently, the NLRB petitioned a court to grant an injunction that would put the strikers back to work under the terms of the old contract while the two sides bargain for a new one. A federal judge denied that request Feb. 13.

Pass, the attorney representing the unions, said the Newspaper Guild (representing Post-Gazette journalists) is likely insulated from adverse NLRB decisions going forward because its case is before a federal appeals court. But unions representing Post-Gazette typesetters, pressmen and advertising staff, Pass said, could have their cases frozen with appeals pending before an NLRB that can’t act.

Pass said the Post-Gazette strike is a result of actions taken by the NLRB during the first Trump Administration in 2019. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge when the newspaper increased health insurance costs for employees. Though a judge ruled in the workers’ favor, the Trump-appointed NLRB majority reversed that decision, helping set the stage for a strike three years later. 

“The Post-Gazette would not be in this situation had Trump not gotten in last time,” Pass said. “Elections have consequences.”

For the journalists who have been away from work for more than two years, many of them writing for the strike publication Pittsburgh Union Progress, the election left the feeling that their long-held goal of going back to work could be pushed even further away.

“My first reaction on election night was like, ‘Oh you’ve got to be kidding me. Now we have to fight even harder?’” said Steve Mellon, a longtime Post-Gazette photojournalist and writer who has been among the strike newspaper’s editors, and has contributed deep coverage of the aftermath of the 2023 East Palestine train derailment.

Mellon said striking workers have developed systems to help each other survive such a prolonged period without paychecks, and none of that support system relies on the NLRB.

Donations from community members and other labor organizations are stockpiled and doled out to strikers who need help paying bills. Most recently, the New York Times Tech Guild donated more than $100,000. “That buys us a lot of time,” Mellon said.

“I think now we’re in a position to show people that you can stand up and continue to fight your battle and not cower under the pressures that the new administration might put on,” Mellon said. “We built up systems to help people survive this. We can model some of that for other people who may have to make a decision to make a stand.”

Jennifer Abruzzo, the NLRB general counsel who Biden appointed and Trump fired last week, wrote in a statement that there’s “no putting that genie back in the bottle” on gains won during the Biden era.

If the agency does not act as it did during her tenure, she wrote, “I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value” they bring their employers.

And while Starbucks workers no longer have the NLRB to “lean back on,” Borowitz said, “Our power never came from the [NLRB]. It’s just a tool that’s used to support us. … Our power always came from our membership.”

“I believe unions are going to be one of the key ways we hold this administration accountable,” Borowitz said. 

The most recent local coffee shop to unionize won their vote Jan. 30, in the dawn of Trump’s second term. Borowitz said she visited the Bethel Park location in December, and immediately noticed baristas tasked with doing two jobs at once. Workers began taking breaks to talk to Borowitz about the union and, she said, 70% of the workers had signed union cards within a week. 

The union announced the Bethel Park workers won their election 10 days into Trump’s second term, days after he effectively froze the NLRB.