In Today’s News and Commentary, updates on the NLRB and Ex-Cell-O; top aides to the Labor Secretary resign; and an Economic Policy Institute Report about attacks on the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

NLRB attorneys have confirmed that the General Counsel is no longer seeking to revisit and have the Board overrule Ex-Cell-O v. NLRB. President Biden’s former General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo called on the Board to overturn Ex-Cell-O, which limits NLRB’s remedial arsenal to a bargaining order rather than a monetary remedy designed to compensate employees when an employer refuses to bargain in good faith in violation of §8(a)(5). The NLRB never acted upon Abruzzo’s request, often severing or sidestepping the issue before the NLRB itself became inoperable due to a lack of quorum. Now, under General Counsel Crystal Carey, Ex-Cell-O’s status is secure once more. Per Law360, the NLRB considered Ex-Cell-O for the first time last week since regaining quorum in January and ultimately held that Ex-Cell-O remains good law, noting that requiring employers to pay compensatory damages for refusing to bargain would  “‘present a realistic threat of interference’ with this ‘regulatory scheme.’” And in a different case involving Starbucks, an NLRB prosecutor requested to withdraw its argument against Ex-Cell-O and have the Board close the case.

Yesterday, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s chief of staff and deputy chief of staff resigned. The two senior aides were given 24 hours to resign after the White House told the Department of Labor to fire them. The aides had been placed on administrative leave in January after the Department of Labor’s Inspector General launched an internal investigation into accusations that they had fabricated work trips for Chavez-DeRemer so she could spend time with family and friends. The Inspector General began investigating misconduct after a formal complaint was filed against Chavez-DeRemer alleging that she pursued a relationship with a member of her security detail. And last month, Chavez-DeRemer’s husband was banned from DOL’s headquarters after allegedly assaulting two staffers. Though the police department in Washington D.C. is not charging Chavez-DeRemer’s husband, he remains banned from the DOL.

Lastly, on Monday, Lynn Rhinehart of the Economic Policy Institute published a report about the short-sightedness of the Trump administration’s attacks on the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS). Established nearly 70 years ago, the FMCS is an independent agency provides free training and mediation services to employers and unions engaged in collective bargaining. It has been particularly successful in helping workers reach an initial agreement with their employer—a critical support to workers as research shows that only slightly more than one-third of new bargaining units reach an initial agreement within one year. Despite the FMCS’s positive impact on the U.S. economy and labor-management relationships, the Trump administration has targeted the agency for elimination. After explaining the scope of FMCS’s power and its work, Rhinehart provides an overview of the structural and existential attacks on the FMCS during the past year. While the FMCS is severely atrophied at the moment—only 58 mediators remain at the agency, which has severely curtailed the quantity, and arguably the quality, of the services it provides—Rhinehart details eleven practical recommendations for restoring and improving FMCS. The recommendations “are designed to stabilize service delivery quickly, rebuild workforce and leadership capacity, and restore the structural independence that labor and management count on when they engage FMCS to help resolve an important dispute.”