An ethics scandal plaguing the National Labor Relations Labor Board is hanging like a “cloud” over the agency, one of President Trump’s nominees conceded on Thursday.
John Ring, a Republican picked to fill an NLRB vacancy, said he wanted to avoid making missteps like those currently hounding William Emanuel, one of Trump’s first picks to serve on the independent agency.
“I do not want to be in the position that Member Emanuel finds himself in,” Ring said at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “And I don’t want to put another cloud over the NLRB.”
Ring, who had been pressed on the matter throughout the hearing by both Republicans and Democrats, was responding to Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
Warren has been dogged in pressing Trump’s NLRB to comply with ethics rules, repeatedly asking Emanuel since the start of his confirmation process to disclose a full list of past clients. She said Thursday that Ring and Emanuel have similar backgrounds in management-side labor law, each with a list of major corporate clients.
Ring’s past clients include Amazon, Warren noted. The online retail giant had also hired Emanuel for his services, two years before his appointment.
Last month, an internal investigation concluded that Emanuel should have recused himself from a major decision made in December.
In his final days as NLRB Chair, Phil Miscimarra had ushered through a case to reverse the Obama administration’s joint employer standard, restoring a loophole enabling corporations to shirk liability for franchise labor practices impacted by “indirect control.”
As agency Inspector General David Berry noted, Emanuel’s former law firm Littler-Mendelson had represented one of the parties in Browning-Ferris, the case setting the Obama-era joint employer standard. Berry called Emanuel’s participation in the reversal as representing “a serious and flagrant problem and/or deficiency” in NLRB ethics controls.
On Monday, the Board voted 3-0 to vacate Hy-Brand, the decision to reverse Browning-Ferris. Emanuel did not take part in the process.
