Following 18 months of negotiation, direct intervention on the part of Mayor Wu, and a one-day strike, more than 200 employees at Boston’s distinguished Museum of Fine Arts ratified a CBA on Tuesday. The contract is the employees’ first collective agreement since they voted in a landslide to join the UAW in 2020, one of many cultural institutions to unionize during the pandemic.

In exciting NLRB news, GC Abruzzo announced yesterday that her office had filed a motion requesting that the Board overturn its holding in Ex-Cell-O, which is an important doctrine that operates to significantly undermine the agency’s remedial powers. Abruzzo expressed interest in revisiting the policy in the “stunning” remedies memo she issued last September, and doing so may have important ramifications for the labor movement.

Section 8(a)(5) of the NLRA obligates employers to bargain in good faith with a union representing their employees. But, as Abruzzo recognized in her announcement, extant Board law enables employers to evade this legal obligation, often for several years, for they face few, if any, meaningful consequences for doing so. This is because the conventional remedy designed to redress an employer’s unlawful refusal to negotiate consists of a mere bargaining order, which in effect instructs the employer to do what it was already statutory required to do. This remedial deficiency cripples unions’ ability to organize new workers and deliver gains to their existing members. In view of these shortcomings, the Ex-Cell-O Board contemplated but ultimately declined to fashion a compensatory remedy for violations of an employer’s duty to bargain. Such a remedy would have obligated an employer to compensate its employees for any financial losses they sustained as a result of its unlawful delay tactics at the bargaining table, based on an estimate of the wage and benefit levels the employees would, or might, have secured had the employer complied with the good-faith bargaining envisaged by the Act. Although the Ex-Cell-O Board identified, correctly enough, that existing remedies for 8(a)(5) violations are “inadequate,” it concluded that it was not statutorily authorized to fashion a compensatory remedy in this context. Abruzzo’s motion asks the Board to reverse that holding.

The GC’s motion may prove consequential, for it has the potential to meaningfully expand the agency’s remedial arsenal, the deficiency of which generations of labor law scholars have decried as one of the “major flaws in the current NLRA regime.” Last September, Professor Sachs observed that “if the Board does a fraction of the things Abruzzo calls for” in her remedies memo, she would become “one of the most consequential GCs in NLRB history.” On Friday, by urging the Board to revisit Ex-Cell-O, Abruzzo took a step in that direction.