In today’s news and commentary, the Fifth Circuit transfers an Anheuser-Busch NLRB case to the Eleventh Circuit, and a new Economic Policy Institute report makes the case for tripling union membership.

The Fifth Circuit agreed to transfer Anheuser-Busch’s challenge to a recent NLRB ruling to the Eleventh Circuit, handing the board a procedural win in its effort to defend and enforce its decision against the brewing company. The underlying dispute stems from a 2012 racial bias and retaliation lawsuit filed by a former union employee in the Middle District of Florida. The NLRB initially signed off on Anheuser-Busch’s motion to compel arbitration in 2019, but the Eleventh Circuit vacated that decision and remanded the case. The NLRB in June accepted that it was bound by the Eleventh Circuit’s prior ruling and held that the company must withdraw its federal court motion for having an illegal objective. The NLRB argued that transfer would promote judicial economy and ensure continuity with the Eleventh Circuit’s earlier decision, an argument the Fifth Circuit accepted without comment in an unpublished opinion.

Next, the Economic Policy Institute released a new report  making the case for tripling US union membership from its current rate of roughly 10% back to the 30% levels seen in the 1950s. The report found that tripling union density would deliver a 14.5% raise, about $7,700 annually, or nearly $270,000 over a 35-year career, for the median worker; shift $1.2 trillion annually to workers; reverse a third of the rise in inequality since 1979; and narrow racial wage gaps by more than one-third. The report attributes declining union density, which fell from over 30% in the 1950s to 22.2% by the 1980s and 10% in 2025, to corporate union-busting and anti-union legislation, noting that worker productivity has grown 2.7 times faster than wages since 1979. “By making it harder and harder for workers to organize and bargain collectively, the rich seized more and more income and wealth, destroying the US middle class,” former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in the report’s foreword. The report proposes a roadmap to rebuild union power, including passing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, guaranteeing annual cost-of-living adjustments for newly unionized workers, requiring collective bargaining at companies where CEO-to-worker pay ratios exceed 100:1, and repealing right-to-work laws, which alone, the report found, would increase union density from 9.9% to 14.4%.