With the Trump-induced shakeups to the National Labor Relations Board earlier this week, journalism’s labor leaders say newsroom unions will likely face even longer processing times for union petitions and labor violation claims, and that the news industry should expect more frequent and drawn out strikes.

President Donald Trump’s move to fire National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and board member Gwynne Wilcox late on Monday night has left the NLRB — an independent government agency tasked with mediating between employers and employees — with just two members on a five-seat panel. (Note: Wilcox’s termination is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, and she is exploring legal action, according to The Guardian). Without a quorum, the Board can’t issue decisions on federal cases.

A right-ward power shift on the already cash-strapped and short-staffed NLRB will likely make the agency more employer-friendly and union organizing more difficult, the labor board’s observers say. Workers across industries, including in journalism, will have to be their own best advocates if they can’t expect enforcement of federal laws.

But first, what does the NLRB do exactly?

The NLRB is a “quasi-judicial” body made up of presidential appointees (confirmed by the Senate) that upholds federal labor laws. It hears and decides cases on labor law violations under the National Labor Relations Act, administers union elections, investigates unfair labor practice charges (ULP) by employers, workers, and unions, and can help mediate disputes between employers and employees.

In the news industry, that has looked like: ruling NBCUniversal couldn’t roll back staff wage increases in 2020; declaring McClatchy couldn’t impose pageview quotas on its journalists while settling an unfair labor practice charge from the Idaho Statesman News Guild in 2021; and seeking an injunction against the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2024 to stop alleged unfair labor practices while its unionized workers are on strike and trying to negotiate a contract.

The agency has 26 field offices across the country that investigate cases in their corresponding regions. If warranted, the regional office files a complaint and then an administrative law judge hears the case in a regional hearing to make a decision. Either party in the case can appeal the decision to a federal appellate court, which can decide to enforce or overturn the NLRB’s ruling. The NLRB itself can’t enforce its own rulings and its stances usually correlate with those of the ruling party of the time.

The agency has been chronically underfunded and understaffed with a steadily increasing workload in recent years, which has weakened its impact and reliability. It can take months or even years for the NLRB to issue a decision in a case, leaving workers in limbo.

Hamilton Nolan is a longtime labor journalist who covers unions, the labor movement, and inequality for In These Times. As a reporter for Gawker in 2015, he was part of the union organizing committee for the Gawker Media union. He said that with a Republican-led NLRB, newsroom unions in disputes with their employers will be less likely to rely on the government as a good-faith referee.

“It will be bad in the sense that Trump is breaking the government machinery that oversees the union organizing process,” Nolan said. “Republicans are making it bureaucratically harder to enforce labor law and get new unions certified. But the fact is that this will only be temporary, and it shouldn’t hold any workers back from organizing. We need unions now more than ever.”

According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 14.3 million unionized workers in the United States in 2024, making up just 9.9% of eligible wage and salary workers. That’s a slight decline from 10.8% in 2020 and 10.7% in 2016. But according to Jon Schleuss, president of The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, the organization saw a huge wave in media union organizing during the first Trump administration. About 3,400 media workers unionized with The NewsGuild-CWA alone between 2017 and 2020, during Trump’s first presidency. Since 2016, nearly 8,000 media workers from 146 companies have unionized with The NewsGuild-CWA. Schleuss said he expects another wave of organizing during Trump’s second term.

“This is a moment when workers, regardless of industry, are going to be trying to reduce the chaos in their lives and especially at work,” Schleuss said. “They’re going to want to form unions, probably at a higher rate.”

Several media organizations in recent years have voluntarily recognized unions formed by their newsrooms. Among those are the Texas Tribune, Politico, The Atlantic, Grist, and ProPublica, to name a few.

However news publisher resistance to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — the federal law that protects employees’ rights to unionize, collectively bargain, and advocate for better working conditions without retaliation — has been part of the story from the beginning. The 1937 Supreme Court ruling in Associated Press v. Labor Board, for example, declared that the AP had illegally fired journalist Morris Watson in 1935 for his union organizing activity, and that “the publisher of a newspaper has no special immunity from the application of general laws. He has no special privilege to invade the rights and liberties of others.” That type of hostility continues today, Media Guild of the West president Matt Pearce said.

“What we’re returning to is a kind of pre-1930s period where employer-labor relations were much more volatile, with more strikes and more disruption to commerce,” Pearce said. “The rules were put in place for a reason. And it’s entirely possible we’re all going to relearn what those reasons were.”

Long wait times

The NLRB has seen a steady increase in its workload in recent years; the NLRB received 3,286 union election petitions between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024, a 27% increase from the previous year and more than double since 2021. It also received over 21,000 unfair labor practice charges, up 7% from the year before. There are currently over 26,000 open unfair labor practice charges, according to the NLRB’s case search portal.

But the agency’s chronic underfunding and understaffing have handicapped its ability to enforce labor laws in a fair and timely manner, labor leaders say. The NLRB went nine years without a budget increase between 2014 and 2023. The agency’s budget was $299 million in 2024, and requested an increase to $320 million for FY 2025, which the NLRB’s own union has said “does not come close to providing us with the resources we need to enforce federal labor law.”

In 2023, the average processing time for a union petition request for an election was 37 days, while the processing time between a petition filing and the certification of election results was 56 days, according to a 2024 report the agency issued. The average processing time for an unfair labor practice charge to be investigated and disposed (concluded) is 124.2 days (four months), up 50% from the year before.

“Sometimes it’s as if there’s no NLRB at all,” Pearce said. “Part of my skeptical reaction is that there’s not going to be much difference, because even if you have a conservative board, it could take a long time for charges to get processed even if you’re going to get rejected by a more employer-friendly, Trump NLRB board.”

Regardless of the board’s partisan slant, those long wait times have real-life implications, putting workers and their livelihoods at risk.

“If the employer is retaliating against employees – if it’s firing employees illegally or implementing changes to benefits or pay without negotiation – that’s harmful,” Schleuss told me.

The dangers of long processing times are already playing out in Connecticut. In August 2024, more than 100 Hearst Connecticut reporters, photographers, editors, and digital producers formed the Connecticut News Guild. Because Hearst said it would not voluntarily recognize the union, the union had to file a petition for its regional NLRB office to administer an election. As of this writing, the regional NLRB office still hasn’t set an election date. A union can’t bargain for a contract with an employer until after election results are certified by the NLRB.

According to Connecticut News Guild organizing committee member Martha Shanahan, the No. 1 question she gets from guild members is when the election will be. She can’t give them an answer. “As it drags out longer and longer, people are going to get tired of hearing that,” Shanahan said.

“Our election being delayed this long is affecting us because it’s just getting much more likely that we might lose people’s hearts or people might get discouraged,” she added. “Our support is still strong, and we do still feel confident that we’ll win the election when we get there. But every week and month that goes by, it’s just that much more time for people to lose momentum.”

Nearly two weeks after the Connecticut News Guild announced its union drive, Hearst Connecticut terminated digital producer and union organizer Adrian Szkolar. According to the guild, Szkolar posted Hearst’s story about the union to the company’s Facebook pages (as part of his job) and included “a statistic that about 85% of the workers had signed union cards … that was not in the piece.”

“This was a clear overreaction and an instance of retaliation against a union organizer,” the guild claimed at the time. “He has had no disciplinary or performance issues. Had this been any other story, he would still have his job.”

“It is absolutely false to say that any employee was terminated for their involvement in union organizing activity,” a Hearst Connecticut spokesperson said in a statement. “Hearst Newspapers respects and supports the rights of employees to organize and engage in protected activities. Our personnel decisions are based solely on business and performance-related factors, in compliance with all applicable laws.”

The Connecticut News Guild filed an unfair labor practice charge against Hearst Connecticut on August 19. The regional NLRB office will make the decisions on the Connecticut News Guild’s election and its unfair labor practice charge, but if Hearst Connecticut appeals either or both decisions to the federal board, that could cause further delays, Shanahan said.

“How long does someone have to wait before the government enforces the law?” Pearce said. “[The NLRB] can come in later and say that [the company] illegally fired someone and has to pay back wages. But in journalism, that can mean that somebody has moved to an entirely different city because that’s what you have to do to find a new job right now. We’re already living in the world that the employers want.”

In Pittsburgh, NLRB decisions have mostly favored the Post-Gazette union, said Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president Zack Tanner. (The union leadership has drawn some criticism.) But the lag in processing unfair labor practice charges can be debilitating for workers and their commitment to the labor movement.

When journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette narrowly voted to follow their colleagues in printing, distribution, and advertising on strike in October 2022, the first newspaper strike in the digital age began. Nearly two and a half years later, it’s the longest ongoing strike in the United States.

“The Post-Gazette certainly felt emboldened to break the law knowing how long it would take the NLRB to be able to put together a case and win these decisions,” Tanner said. “We’re sitting here in 2025 awaiting enforcement orders on complaints that were filed in 2020 or earlier. Members had their pay cut, their health care costs more than tripled in some cases, and they had basic job protections eliminated because of that lawbreaking. Those are actions that test anyone’s resolve to fight and make work life more stressful, and frankly just worse.”

More strikes and strike publications

Some news unions won’t want to — or can’t afford to — wait for the government to intervene on their behalf. Instead, they may opt for collective action, like walking off the job, picketing, running social media campaigns, slowing down work, and striking.

There have been 93 strikes by NewsGuild-CWA unions since 2022, including 36 strikes in 2024 alone. One day before Election Day, The New York Times Tech Guild went on strike for eight days after more than two years of contract negotiations with the company. The NYT Tech Guild donated the remainder of its unused strike funds ($114,000) to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette union’s strike fund.

In September, the Law360 union went on strike after the publication laid off employees and reportedly violated its contract by making changes to workers’ healthcare plans. In February 2024, over 200 Tribune Publishing employees (owned by Alden Global Capital) walked off the job for 24 hours in protest of the company’s low wages and threat to revoke retirement benefits.

But when journalists stop working, everyone suffers, Schleuss said. News goes uncovered and audiences are less informed. To combat this issue in Pittsburgh, the union launched its own publication, the Pittsburgh Union Progress, so its journalists could continue covering their beats and report updates on their own disputes with the Post-Gazette. In its description, the Union Progress vows to stop publication when those disputes are resolved. Law360 similarly launched a strike newsletter Outlaw360, and the Business Insider union published stories on Business Outsider during a week-long strike in 2023.

“I think it’s bad that we have these prolonged work stoppages to begin with,” Pearce said. “Journalists are looking around and realizing that the NLRB is not going to come save you. If you want something out of your crappy news company, you’re going to have to go fight for it yourself out on the picket line.”

Schleuss, Nolan, and Pearce were all in agreement that collective action, particularly strikes, are more effective than legal recourse and will probably become more frequent under current conditions.

“You’re going to see more people withholding their labor because journalists have already been beaten down and under attack,” Schleuss said. “They shouldn’t be continually beaten down by their employers who are, in theory, asking them to do [good work] covering our democracy and holding power to account, when at the same time they’re preventing them from having equitable pay or decent family leave or retirement [savings] that they can count on.”