Introduction -

In the final year of his two term tenure, President Barack Obama’s National Labor Relations Board and Department of Labor continued their double barrelled efforts to remake labor law to benefit labor unions. Throughout the year, the agencies issued case decisions casually casting aside decades of precedent and engaged in aggressive — and unconstitutional — administrative rulemaking in pursuit of this agenda.

Board decisions continued to break completely new ground, and to expand the scope of the NLRA’s protections in seemingly infinite fashion. The General Counsel brandished the new joint employment standard to challenge a wide variety of traditional business models. The DOL’s new “Persuader Rule” and the FAR Council’s “Blacklisting” Regulations devised colossal new regulatory schemes, threatening the ability of employers to operate across broad stretches of industry. And then, all of a sudden, with the most shocking electoral development in decades, by year’s end, the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency is poised to undo much of this administrative overreach.

We submit this Year in Review to summarize the most noteworthy developments in 2016 — as we emerge from a wildly unusual political year, and head into a new year potentially bringing even more mystery with it. Additional information on these topics and more is available at our Labor Relations Today blog (laborrelationstoday.com), where we will continue to chronicle and alert readers to significant changes in the law as they unfold in 2017 and beyond.