(The Center Square) — A federal judge has overturned New York’s “NLRB trigger” law following a lawsuit from Amazon, which claimed it was an unconstitutional “power grab” by the state’s labor board.
In the ruling, U.S. District Court judge Eric Komitee said the 2025 state law giving the New York State Public Employment Relations Board authority to oversee union elections and resolve unfair labor practice charges is preempted by a 1959 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, that deemed federal employee labor rights to be the “exclusive domain” of the national labor board.
“No matter how defendants frame their argument, they are ultimately asking the Court to overrule — or invent a new exception to — the preemption doctrine laid out by the Supreme Court,” he wrote in his order.
Komitee, a Trump appointee, had previously blocked New York labor officials from enforcing the law after Amazon one a preliminary injunction in November, but his latest ruling makes it permanent.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the New York labor board or the Teamsters union, which was also a party in the lawsuit, would appeal the ruling.
Amazon sued last August after PERB invoked the law to challenge the firing of Brima Sylla, a union vice president and employee at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, even as the NLRB was conducting its own review. Union officials allege that Sylla was fired for organizing workers at the Staten Island facility, which Amazon denies.
The lawsuit was one of many legal challenges to New York’s law, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul last year. The law authorizes the state’s labor board to assert jurisdiction over disputes between employers and recognized employee organizations if the National Labor Relations Board is “unable” to resolve the dispute.
The National Labor Relations Board filed a lawsuit against New York last year, claiming the law stripped the agency of its “statutory duties” to investigate unfair labor practices by public and private sector unions. The outcome of that case is still pending.
Hochul has touted the new measure as a response to the Trump administration’s efforts to “dismantle” labor unions and said the new requirements protect worker rights.
But lawyers for Amazon argued in court filings that the New York law “flips U.S. labor law on its head” by giving the state’s PERB jurisdiction over every private-sector employer “until the NLRB gets a court to hold otherwise.”
