This is how long justice for workers takes. Walmart fired and disciplined dozens of workers after they staged a strike in the summer of 2013. In November of that year, the National Labor Relations Board authorized complaints against Walmart for that retaliation, and in January 2014, word came that the case would go before a judge. Two years later, we have a ruling, and it’s not making Walmart happy:

Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter said in a ruling posted on the board's website that the U.S. retailer violated labor law by "disciplining or discharging several associates because they were absent from work while on strike". [...] Carter ordered Wal-Mart to offer 16 former workers their previous jobs and make them "whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits suffered as a result of the discrimination against them". Wal-Mart was also ordered to hold a meeting in more than two dozen stores to inform workers of their rights to organize under U.S. labor law.

You can’t fire workers for exercising their legal right to concerted activity. Not legally, anyway, though companies do it all the time, figuring that they might get away with it and at most might have to cough up a little back pay if they don’t get away with it.

But this isn’t the end. Walmart is promising to appeal the ruling, further delaying whatever justice these workers are going to get. Still, the fact that things got this far is yet another reminder that presidents matter. If the president was a Republican, the NLRB would be majority Republican—would a Republican NLRB even have sent this case to a judge?