Washington, DC – In February 2022, CDW filed a FOIA request with the NLRB to better understand how the agency came to the conclusion that Members Wilcox and Prouty should not recuse themselves from cases involving their former employer, the SEIU, or the joint employer standard, on which both members previously advocated.

After two months of delays, the NLRB finally handed over documents, including this memorandum from the Designated Agency Ethics Official to Members Wilcox and Prouty outlining their recusal obligations related to cases dealing with the SEIU and the joint employer standard. Unfortunately, the NLRB has chosen to hide their justifications for allowing Members Prouty and Wilcox to participate in these cases by redacting these documents so heavily that they are essentially meaningless and don’t provide any avenue to hold the government accountable.

The NLRB is ignoring their responsibility under the law to allow public oversight over their ethics determinations. Members Wilcox and Prouty’s participation in SEIU and joint employer cases would clearly be – or at the very least create the appearance of – a conflict of interest, but rather than explaining how they came to such a ludicrous conclusion, they’ve decided to keep the public and regulated community in the dark.