With a wave of unionization sweeping across America, the agency that oversees labor relations is struggling to keep up.

The National Labor Relations Board is funded by Congress and its budget is unchanged since fiscal year 2014. Over time, inflation has eaten into that figure to the point that now the agency is effectively operating with a 25% lower budget than nine years ago. This is in contrast with the growing caseload the agency is addressing thanks to increasing unionization.

Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer for the Communications Workers of America, said without additional funding, the agency may have to cut staff.

"The agency is seeing a lot of work responding to election petitions and to employer misbehavior," she said, "and at the same time, they're contemplating the need to potentially do a furlough of their employees."

The NLRB warned Congress in a letter in November that the current funding level is impairing its ability to maintain staff capacity at its headquarters and 48 field offices across the nation.

The work of NLRB includes both union representation cases and investigating unfair labor practices. The number of both types of cases has increased, with the total caseload up 23% over last year, yet over the last decade, the total number of personnel at the NLRB has declined by 30%. The NLRB letter to Congress said the staff reduction and increasing caseload is slowing case processing to the detriment of both employers and employees.

Steffens said workers with claims against employers are dependent on this one agency.

"Really there is only one place, the National Labor Relations Board, that protects workers in these situations," she said. "So, if they are underfunded, it's like tying the government's hand behind its back when it comes to enforcing labor laws."

Union advocates are calling for Congress to appropriate $368 million to fund the NLRB next year.

With union organizing on an upswing, public sentiment about unions is as well, with a Gallup poll this year showing the highest level of approval for unions since 1965. Steffens said she believes the labor organizing will continue.

"This is a wave of organizing that is not stopping," she said. "The rate of winning union elections is up, I want to say it's 71% over the course of the first part of this year."

National proposals to end taxes on tips might have mixed effects on New Yorkers.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have developed variations of the policy, which would let workers keep more of their tips. But many tipped workers do not earn enough income for a living wage because they make a subminimum wage, which is $16 with tip credits in New York.

Saru Jayaraman, president of the advocacy group One Fair Wage, said both candidates would take separate approaches to implementing their policies.

"Trump's proposal also would provide that same tax exemption to hedge fund billionaires and Harris' proposal, you know, when she elevated it did call for raising the minimum wage in addition to ending taxes on tips," Jayaraman explained.

She argued the best way to implement change is by ending the subminimum wage. Several states and cities have done it, but New York's bill faces opposition from groups like the New York Restaurant Association. However, restaurants in different states are seeing dividends from paying workers a full minimum wage with tips. Several states have ballot measures this year to end the subminimum wage.

On average, tipped wage workers in New York earn almost $18 an hour with tips. But the living hourly wage for a single New Yorker is closer to $27. Beyond state-level hesitation to pass such laws, Jayaraman noted a big challenge to make sure if Congress passes a bill, it is done so equitably.

"The only way it's fair to other workers is if you're exempting taxes on tips that are above the minimum wage, not tips that bring you to the minimum wage," Jayaraman emphasized. "Because otherwise other minimum wage workers are paying tax on the minimum wage and then you'd have tipped workers not paying taxes on their minimum wage."

Advocates said it could also lead unscrupulous businesses to switch to a tipping model so they would not have to pay their workers a full minimum wage. She argued there would have to be some kind of guard enacted in the policy to prevent it from happening.

Unionized workers with the federal agency responsible for processing immigration and asylum paperwork claim they are being forced to turn their jobs over to non-union labor, in violation of federal law.

United Electrical, Radio, & Machine Workers of America members say the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Nebraska Service Center is laying off union workers in Nebraska and other states, and moving the jobs to non-union operations.

UE Local 808 President Dawn Meyer calls the center's move "union busting."

"What they are doing is, they're taking good union jobs," said Meyer. "They're outsourcing them to places that are paying less money, are less efficient, are far less vigilant in accuracy. They're risking people's ability to get immigration benefits."

Meyer said UE workers are a skilled, experienced workforce that performs clerical and pre-adjudication tasks.

They serve the immigration pipeline for asylum seekers, refugees, and victims of human trafficking and domestic violence.

The U.S. CIS did not respond to a request for comment.

Meyer said the U.S. CIS is playing a "shell game," laying off union workers and moving their jobs to the non-union Lockbox location in Dallas.

The work there principally involves the processing of fee-bearing petitions. She said the decision to relocate this work has resulted in predictable delays in processing.

"All these contracts are supposed to be open to the public because SCA is supposed to be a transparent process," said Meyer. "So it makes it very difficult for the common person to go looking for, 'Hey, what's my government doing?'"

UE locals in Lincoln, Essex, Vermont, and Laguna Niguel, California have recently held protests of the layoff policies - calling for the government to stop so-called "rolling layoffs," aimed at reducing the unionized workforce at all three locations by about two thirds between 2023 and 2025.


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New data show fast food jobs have been on the upswing in the four months since the minimum wage in the sector went from $16 to $20 an hour.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found California added 11,000 new fast-food jobs from April to July and showed increases year over year each month since January.

Michael Reich, professor of economics at the University of California-Berkeley, said the data contradicts doomsday predictions from opponents of raising the minimum wage.

"The knock is that a minimum wage increase would lead to businesses closing, workers getting laid off, and much higher prices," Reich recounted. "That's been the knock on every minimum wage increase since 1938. Indeed, a large number of studies have found that minimum wages do not reduce employment in fast food."

Reich noted while fast food work is expanding, its growth has slowed because overall economic growth has slowed but not because of the higher minimum wage. He said the effect of higher fast-food workers' wages on the overall economy is too small to detect.

Reich pointed out higher wages have certainly benefited workers' bottom line, which leads to more spending in the local economy. They have also led to slightly higher restaurant prices.

"Fast food prices may have gone up one or two percent, compared to how much they increased in other states that did not raise their minimum wage," Reich explained. "That's not enough to reduce consumer spending. So the minimum wage essentially leads to an income transfer from the people who eat in those restaurants to the people who work in those restaurants."

Some individual fast food managers worried they would lose business if they increased their prices to offset higher labor costs. But Reich countered the cost increases affect all fast food restaurants, so individual businesses would not lose market share.


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