The National Labor Relations Board has been running on three members since December 2025, which is the bare minimum to issue a decision and one resignation away from issuing nothing at all.
The Senate fixed that on August 7, confirming James Macy, a Republican who has served at the Department of Labor and spent his career as a management-side labor attorney, and David Prouty, the Democrat first seated in 2021 and now renominated. Both terms run to August 2031.
Why the timing was structural
Prouty’s existing term was expiring this month. Had he not been renominated alongside Macy, the Board would have dropped below the three-member quorum the Supreme Court requires for it to act, and every pending case would have stalled indefinitely.
Instead the Board goes to four members with a 3-1 Republican majority, with one of five seats still vacant. Associated Builders and Contractors, which has been pressing the Senate on labor nominations, applauded the confirmations.
What a working majority can actually do
A quorum lets the Board decide cases. A majority lets it overturn its own precedent, and that’s the part construction employers should be reading.
Three lines of precedent matter here. Cemex bargaining orders, which let the Board order an employer to bargain without an election in certain circumstances. The 2023 joint-employer framework, which broadened when one company can be held responsible for another’s workforce. And Section 8(f) pre-hire agreement rules, which govern how union and open-shop contractors alike handle project labor arrangements.
Construction is unusually exposed on joint employer, because multi-employer jobsites are the norm rather than the exception. A general contractor exercising ordinary schedule and safety control over subs’ crews sits close to the line under the broader standard, and the tiered staffing arrangements common on large jobs sit closer still.
The practical move
Contractors with pending unfair labor practice charges, active organizing petitions, or joint-employer exposure across subcontractor and staffing tiers should expect movement in the fourth quarter and into 2027. The backlog that built up over eight months has to clear somewhere.
The useful step now is a review of staffing and sub-tier arrangements with labor counsel while the precedent is still unsettled, rather than after the first reversal lands and creates a rule everyone has to react to. That’s particularly true on federal work, where prime contractors on projects like the new Fort Lauderdale U.S. Courthouse carry both labor-standards obligations and multi-employer site control.
None of this happens quickly. Board decisions that reverse precedent take a case with the right facts, full briefing, and often a year or more. But the direction is now set, and it points toward employers.