National Right to Work Foundation Attorney to Appear Before U.S. House in Hearing on Labor Board Reforms
Aaron Solem will call for demise of coercive Biden-era policies
Washington, DC (June 11, 2025) – In a hearing today, veteran National Right to Work Foundation Staff Attorney Aaron Solem will testify before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce’s Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions. He will discuss the reforms needed to reverse the ways the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), especially under the Biden Administration, rigged the rules to promote union boss power at the expense of the rights of independent-minded workers.
During a hearing titled “Restoring Balance: Ensuring Fairness and Transparency at the NLRB,” Solem will discuss how current NLRB rules allow union officials to corral and keep workers in union ranks without a vote, and let union officials force workers to subsidize union ideological activities. Solem, who has a thirteen-year career of defending workers from union coercion before the courts and administrative agencies like the NLRB, will be urging several reforms to protect workers’ individual rights.
Solem will appear as an expert witness at the hearing chaired by Georgia Congressman Rick Allen. Also appearing on the witness stand will be Jennifer Abruzzo, a former high-ranking lawyer for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union and ex-General Counsel of the Biden NLRB, who during her time at the agency pushed to make it more difficult for workers to escape union control.
“These are anti-employee policies because they cancel worker choices and replace them with decisions made by unions and the government,” Solem’s written testimony reads. “President Trump won reelection because he was the candidate who listened to employees. The Board should follow in those footsteps by pursuing a truly pro-employee agenda. This agenda would put power in the hands of workers—not unions or employers—— to decide whether they want to be represented by a labor union.”
Biden-Era NLRB Policies Stripped Workers of Right to Exit & Defund Unwanted Unions
Solem’s written testimony breaks down several policies advanced by the Biden NLRB that strip workers of their right to vote themselves free of unwanted union influence. Among these are the “blocking charge” policy, which “allows unions to unilaterally block [union] decertification elections just by filing a charge against an employer, no matter how meritless it may be,” and the so-called “voluntary recognition bar,” which prevents workers from requesting an election to remove a union after union officials gain power through the unreliable “card check” method. Card check abandons the security of a secret-ballot union vote and instead relies on union authorization cards collected by union officials from workers – often through coercive tactics.
Solem also urges the NLRB to “follow Supreme Court precedent and require non-member employees to opt-in to paying for union political expenditures.” As it currently stands, employees who are not union members must “jump through several procedural hoops” to pay a reduced amount of union dues that excludes expenses for union political activities they may staunchly disagree with. The right to pay this reduced amount is enshrined in the Foundation-won CWA v. Beck Supreme Court decision, but current NLRB policies don’t sufficiently protect it.
Freedom vs. Coercion for Workers on Display
“At this hearing, House members will see two starkly differing visions for American workers,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Aaron Solem will advocate for a future where workers can decide for themselves whether or not a union in their workplace is right for them, while Jennifer Abruzzo will double down on granting union officials sweeping coercive powers to impose their will on working people.
“American workers, who are affiliating with unions at near-record-low numbers and overwhelmingly support voluntary and not forced unionism, deserve to have an NLRB where their individual rights are protected and not ceded to union officials and their political cronies,” Mix added. “The incoming Trump NLRB should relegate the cynical, top-down, forced-unionism approach of Jennifer Abruzzo and the Biden NLRB to the dustbin of history, and empower workers by protecting their individual freedoms.”
U.S. House Committee Spotlights Need for Employee Protections Against Forced Funding of Extremist Unions
Jewish MIT graduate student forced to pay dues to anti-Israel GSU union will testify alongside National Right to Work Foundation staff attorney
Washington, DC (July 9, 2024) – Today, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Ph.D. student Will Sussman, who is receiving free legal aid from the National Right to Work Foundation in filing federal anti-discrimination charges against union bosses on campus, is testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
Sussman is testifying alongside veteran Foundation staff attorney Glenn Taubman, who is providing free legal representation to Sussman and other MIT graduate students challenging forced-dues demands from the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU-UE, an affiliate of the United Electrical Workers union).
The hearing, being held by Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) in the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), was called to focus on how union bosses have used their government-granted powers to force Jewish and other employees to associate with and fund unions – even as union officials are propping up increasingly radical protests and other objectionable activities on college campuses and workplaces across the country.
Jewish MIT Graduate Student: BDS-Linked Union Refused to Grant Religious Accommodation
Sussman, who is Jewish, objects to the anti-Israel advocacy of the GSU union, including the union’s endorsement of the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement. He and four other Jewish graduate students sent letters to GSU union officials earlier this year requesting religious accommodations to union dues payment.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires union officials to accommodate those that have religious objections to subsidizing union activities; in practice this usually entails letting the student pay an amount equivalent to dues to a charity. However, GSU union officials’ initial response was to brush aside students’ requests, claiming they didn’t understand their own faith and that their objections were actually political and not religious in nature.
“The union denied my request, telling me in a letter that ‘no principles, teachings or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees to a labor union,’ that one of UE’s founders was Jewish, and that opposition to BDS isn’t a position I hold for religious reasons. In other words, UE thinks it understands my faith better than I do,” Sussman’s testimony reads.
Sussman is one of six MIT graduate students that Foundation attorneys are representing in federal proceedings against the GSU union.
Biden NLRB Policy Lets Union Officials Seize Control Over Graduate Students
As Foundation attorney Glenn Taubman’s testimony describes, partisan rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have bypassed Congress and given union bosses the ability to seize control over graduate students: “The current travesty of herding graduate students into anti-semitic unions finds its source with the Obama-Biden National Labor Relations Boards, which have by fiat turned graduate students into graduate employees – subject to unionization under the NLRA and, of course, the payment of forced union dues as a condition of their academic careers,” Taubman’s testimony reads.
Giving unions such monopoly bargaining power not only permits union bosses to dictate the conditions of graduate students’ academic work, but also gives them the power to force students to pay dues in states that lack Right to Work laws (like Massachusetts).
Even worse, union bosses are able to conduct disruptive strikes that stunt academic progress and frequently have outrageous political elements that have no connection to academics: For example, the recent strike United Auto Workers (UAW) union officials engineered against the University of California system was designed to defend anti-Israel rioters who were suspended and pressure university administrators into divesting from companies supporting Israel.
“Mr. Sussman’s situation should provide to American legislators a harrowing example of the kind of harm workers experience when union bosses seize monopoly bargaining power and become the mouthpiece for an entire workplace,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “The NLRB under Biden and Obama has done even more damage by expanding this coercion into academia, where campus unions have fomented unprecedented division all while threatening dissenting students with the loss of their academic work if they don’t pay up to support radical union activities.”
“National Right to Work legislation would ensure that those trapped under unwanted union influence can protect their hard-earned money from flowing into union bosses’ pockets,” Mix added. “Ultimately, though, no individual should be forced under union bosses’ so-called ‘representation’ against their will, no matter whether the source of their opposition is religious, political, or any other reason.”
