Trump eyes union-buster for NLRB Minneapolis attorney Doug Seaton is one of three labor lawyers on the Trump administration's shortlist for two empty seats on the National Labor Relations Board.

"America's labor leaders will always find an open door with Donald Trump," the president assured attendees at a building trades convention earlier this month. But Trump may soon nominate a union-buster to the National Labor Relations Board.

Minneapolis attorney Doug Seaton is one of three labor lawyers on the Trump administration's shortlist for two empty seats on the NLRB. None of the three candidates is pro-union, but Seaton — who calls himself a "lawyer for employers" — stands apart. He makes his living, in part, by hiring himself out to managers on whose behalf he urges workers not to join unions.


Starting with Ronald Reagan, Republican presidents have often named stridently anti-union executives and attorneys to the NLRB. But labor and management sources queried by POLITICO couldn't remember a previous instance when a president placed on the NLRB a "union avoidance" consultant or "persuader," an occupation known colloquially as union-buster. The Labor Department requires union-busters to disclose their anti-union campaigns publicly. Seaton has done so on six occasions, most recently in May 2016.

"That is way out of line," said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America. "Seaton would represent one of the worst-ever nominees to the NLRB."

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, agreed. "Doug Seaton's potential nomination," she said in a written statement, "would be the latest example of Trump turning his back on workers." Seaton "has spent his professional career fighting workers' effort to join unions and gain a voice on the job," she said. "He has no place on a board whose sole mission is to empower and protect working people."

The preamble to the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that created the NLRB, declares it "the policy of the United States" to encourage "the practice and procedure of collective bargaining" and to protect "the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment."

Asked to comment, a White House spokesman said, "We don't comment on personnel issues and we don't have any personnel announcements at this time."

Seaton is now leading a seventh persuasion campaign, to decertify the Service Employees International Union from representing Minnesota's 27,000 home health care workers. Because state law designates these "personal care assistants," or PCAs, as public employees, Seaton is not required to register this activity with DOL.

Seaton's union-busting is on behalf of MNPCA, a group of individuals caring for disabled family members who oppose SEIU. The effort is bankrolled in part by the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minnesota that also backed a “right to work” proposal in the state in 2012.

"Minnesota PCAs don't need a union," MNPCA's website reads. "The SEIU is taking a cut of a public subsidy — and then taking credit for benefits the legislature provides anyway. That's just wrong!" The website includes an " election card" to request that the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services authorize an election to decertify SEIU. Separate flyers with copies of the election card direct readers to send the filled-out cards to Seaton’s firm.

The mediation bureau dismissed MNPCA's petition in February, saying it did not receive enough cards, but "that action has been appealed and will not stand," Seaton wrote in a March 27 letter to Minnesota state agencies that hire PCAs. In the letter, Seaton urged the agencies to distribute flyers favoring decertification. Earlier this month Seaton canvassed for decertification in Edina, Minn.

“It’s such an unusual role for a management lawyer to play," said Brendan Cummins, a labor attorney working with SEIU who has known Seaton for a decade.

Jamie Gulley, president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, called Seaton’s work “intense anti-union activism” and said, “He is not fit to serve on the NLRB."

Seaton told POLITICO that his work for MNPCA will help home health care workers “extricate themselves” from a union contract “designed to create a cash flow for the SEIU.” Many of the PCAs, Seaton said, care for family members and are not traditional state employees. “For an entity like SEIU to be taking dues money from those individuals is just wrong,” he said.

DOL filings show that Seaton previously was a union-buster in May 2016 for Finishing Touch Plus, Inc. in Hudson, Wisc., working to dissuade employees from joining the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 82. Before that, he performed the same function for Plehal Blacktopping, Inc. in Shakopee, Minn.; for Horizon Roofing in Waite Park, Minn.; for Melrose Electric in Melrose, Minn.; for Tappe Construction in Savage, Minn; and for Advanced Energy Services in Plymouth, Minn. Seaton’s efforts were uniformly successful; records indicate that no workers at these firms ever filed with the NLRB to hold a union election.

Kurt Scepaniak, president of business development for Horizon Roofing, said he hired Seaton to speak to his employees as a preventive measure. "Kind of like you brush your teeth so you don't get cavities," he said. Scepaniak declined to discuss details of what Seaton said in a meeting with his employees, citing attorney-client privilege. But he called Seaton "a hard worker and a stand-up guy."

“There isn’t anyone who knows the substantive area better than Doug Seaton. He’s very sharp,” said Joe Schmitt, a management-side lawyer in Minnesota who worked alongside Seaton in the 1990s. “But he is extremely management-side. I’m on the same side as Doug, but he is one of the most extreme management-side lawyers I know. I’m not a big fan of unions, but Doug is much less of a fan.”

Indeed, some employers find Seaton too anti-union for their tastes. Dale Wiehoff is a board member for Wedge Community Co-op, a natural-foods grocery based in Minnesota. Wiehoff said Wedge hired Seaton's law firm in 2012 to advise it on negotiations with its union. But union members said merely hiring the firm demonstrated that Wedge was acting in bad faith, prompting the co-op to reverse course.

“We were looking to have successful negotiations with the union and not have a confrontation,” Wiehoff said. “So we just didn’t need a firm that had that kind of track record.”

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Seaton's current work is a far cry from his college days as a left-wing student activist with Students for a Democratic Society. In his 2015 book " Princeton Radicals of the 1960s," William Tucker writes of a young Seaton who spent summers organizing tenants’ unions in Cleveland and helping to organize a graduate student union at Rutgers University. Seaton, Tucker writes, came to view the notion of a class struggle as as a “series of fraudulent claims, overreaching bargaining, grievance claims [and] uneconomic wages.”

Tucker "accurately portrays my change and progress," Seaton said. “I was an arrogant young leftist once upon a time.”

Today, Seaton fights unions not only in the trenches, but also in the courtroom. He was the lead attorney in a challenge to the Obama Labor Department’s “ persuader rule." The regulation would have expanded the group of people required to register anti-union activities with the Labor Department to include consultants and attorneys who advise managers on how to resist unions but do not come into contact with workers. The rule's implementation was blocked in November by a federal judge in Texas through a separate challenge.

If nominated and confirmed for the NLRB post, Seaton said he hopes to shift the board’s balance. “It’s gone too far in the pro-union direction," he said, "and I think it needs to be tweaked back.” But, “It’s not accurate to say I’m anti-union. I think they have a significant role to play.”

Indeed, Seaton rejects the label "union-buster." Unions often “fudge” and “misrepresent” what unionization is, he said. “We are simply brought in to explain. There’s always another side to the story. Here it is.”

Ian Kullgren contributed to this report.