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61 Ohio St. L.J. 1361 (2000)
A Quiet Revolution at the Labor Board: The Transformation of the NLRB 1935-2000

handle is hein.journals/ohslj61 and id is 1373 raw text is: A Quiet Revolution at the Labor Board: The Transformation of the NLRB, 1935-2000 JOAN FLYNN* As the twentieth century comes to a close, the National Labor Relations Board has come 180 degrees from its origins in the New Deal era The Congress that created the Board in 1935 envisioned a body made up wholly of impartial Government members, and consistent with this spirit, early Board appointees were drawn from government or other neutral backgrounds. President Eisenhower, however, the first Republican President since the passage of the Labor Act, quickly broke with this tradition and appointed individuals from the management side to the Board Although such partisan appointments were originally a source of controversy, over the last half-century they have gradually become not only accepted, but the norm. Indeed, the two most recent Boards have consisted of two management and two union lawyers flanking a neutral as chair and swing vote-the very tripartite model of the agency that had been explicitly considered and decisively rejected by the Congress that brought the Board into being. In this article, Professor Flynn traces the evolution in NLRB appointment norms and practices from 1935 to today, assesses the impact of the increased prevalence ofpartisan Board members on NLRB decision-making and attempts to explain why the partisan appointees of the last ffleen years have, according to the empirical data; been so much more one-sided in their voting than were their predecessors from similar backgrounds. She concludes that this marked increase in partisan voting which has been particularly pronounced during the Clinton years, is a product of a shif toward greater senatorial control over the appointments process at the expense of the President. She further concludes that this shift in the norms governing the NLRB appointments process, which is reflected most starkly in the rise of 'packaged appointments, is part of a more general shift in presidential appointment norms. Thus, this article places contemporary NLRB appointment practices not only in sharp juxtaposition to the practices that held sway in the Act's early years, but in the context of larger trends in the political process. * Assistant Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, Cleveland State University; formerly, Staff Counsel, Member Charles I. Cohen, National Labor Relations Board, Washington, D.C. (1994-96), Field Attorney, National Labor Relations Board, Chicago, Illinois (1989-91). B.A., Grinnell College, 1982; J.D., New York University, 1987. I am extremely grateful to Kevin Luken for tracking down the vast majority of the source materials involved in the writing of this article and for his great enthusiasm for the overall project, and to Roger Bundy for stepping in at the eleventh hour and finishing off the job. Special thanks are also owed to Mark Gooch, formerly the Government Information Specialist at the Cleveland- Marshall Law Library, for his invaluable assistance-and persistence-in locating materials for this article. Finally, my thanks to Alan Weinstein and Deborah Geier for reviewing an earlier draft of this article, and to the Cleveland-Marshall Fund for providing the financial support for this project.

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