Obama appoints two widely-respected members to the NLRB

President Obama has used recess appointments to fill two positions on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The president has the power to make such appointments without congressional approval when the U.S. House and Senate are not in session.

The NLRB is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1935 to administer the National Labor Relations Act, the primary law governing relations between unions and employers in the private sector.

A five-person board governs the agency. One seat on the board remains vacant.

A Republican filibuster in the Senate blocked Obama’s nomination of Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, two respected labor lawyers.

The two men were nominated last July and received approval from the Senate Judiciary committee, but Democrats were unable to amass the votes to overcome a filibuster that prevented an up-or-down vote on the nominations.

“America’s working women and men have been waiting for these appointments for quite a while,” UFCW Local 135 President Mickey Kasparian said. “It’s a shame that partisan obstructionism made it take this long.

“All we ask for is fair treatment. These men will bring some long-needed balance back to the NLRB.”

Recess appointments are a tool that almost every president has used to one degree or another.

President Bush had made 15 recess appointments by this point in his presidency. These are President Obama’s first recess appointments.
Craig Becker previously served as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the AFL-CIO. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1978 and received his J.D. in 1981 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

For the past 27 years, Becker has practiced and taught labor law and has published articles on labor and employment law in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review and the Chicago Law Review. He has argued labor and employment cases in federal appellate court and before the United States Supreme Court.

Mark Gaston Pearce has been a labor lawyer for his entire career.  He is one of the founding partners of the Buffalo, N.Y. law firm of Creighton, Pearce, Johnsen & Giroux, where he practiced labor and employment law before state and federal courts and agencies, including the New York State Public Employment Relations Board, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor and the NLRB.

Pearce is a fellow in the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Prior to 2002, Pearce practiced labor and employment law and was an attorney and trial specialist for the NLRB in Buffalo. 

Pearce received his J.D. from State University of New York and his B.A. from Cornell University.