By Jon Steingart

Law360 (August 14, 2020, 6:17 PM EDT) -- The National Labor Relations Board general counsel on Friday defended his team's plan to spread work more evenly among their regional offices, suggesting top congressional Democrats relied on inaccurate news coverage when they wrote to him with concerns that he was sidelining senior career personnel.

General counsel Peter Robb said these senior workers came up with a resource sharing plan on their own because they realized some offices had heavier workloads than others. The only role he played in developing the plan was providing encouragement, he said, adding that he wouldn't stand in its way.

"The transfer of cases from one region to another for investigation and/or litigation has occurred in the agency for decades and is not something novel or unexpected," Robb said in a letter to top Democrats. "This transferring of cases is one mechanism I have used to avoid closing regional offices, which my predecessors have done."

The plan under discussion involves the general counsel's District IV, which includes regional offices in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Oakland, California.

Robb said the plan would help balance several considerations, including each office's per capita case load, the number of attorneys assigned to litigate each case, and the ratio of supervisors and direct reports. Addressing the lawmakers' concerns that the plan would demote half of the agency's regional directors of color, Robb said a Black regional chief came up with the idea to distribute cases among offices.

Robb said the work sharing plan had been mischaracterized as a reorganization, and that there is no plan to restructure the offices.

"Certain conclusions that were apparently drawn from the misinformation provided to Congress were quite simply incorrect. Even worse, erroneous conclusions and spurious speculation appeared in the media, even before I received your letter, much less had an opportunity to respond," Robb wrote. "Rest assured that if and when I develop a plan for re-organizing or eliminating regional offices, I will seek advice from Congress before implementation."

In response to Robb's letter, a spokesperson for the House Education and Labor Committee suggested the NLRB could manage its workload by using funds Congress gives it to hire more people.

"If the NLRB is concerned that certain regions do not have enough staff to effectively serve workers, it should hire more staff in those regions. Notably, it has ended each of the last two years without using all of the funding Congress provided," the spokesperson said. "Instead, the board appears to have been quietly planning to restructure regional offices in a way that may disrupt the enforcement of labor law in the western half of the United States."

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee that controls NLRB funding, said Democrats and Republicans worked together to pass legislation directing the agency to hire people so it could accomplish its mission and giving it the resources it needed to do so. During a subcommittee hearing in March, Robb pledged the agency would meet the target, she said.

"If it was not already clear, Mr. Robb is not a man of his word," DeLauro said. "He is not complying with the bipartisan directive, NLRB field staff have been decimated, and he is now dealing with the consequences of this mismanagement through a secretive reorganization."

Robb's letter was in response to one that DeLauro, U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott of Virginia and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington sent him on Aug. 6 to express concerns that the plan would partially shift some consideration of cases away from the regional office where they were filed, undercutting experienced field personnel.

"There is no reason to sideline the regional directors' expertise and shift the authority to assign and handle incoming cases away from the regions," their letter said. Scott is the chairman and Murray the ranking member of their respective House and Senate committees that oversee the NLRB.

Changes to procedures within the general counsel's office have been under scrutiny since Robb, President Donald Trump's first appointee to be the NLRB's top prosecutor, took the helm in late 2017, flipping it from Obama administration appointees. In June 2018, Robb told a labor law conference that a potential reorganization wouldn't place regional offices under a group of political appointees. His remarks followed reports a few months earlier that the agency was considering subjecting regional directors to additional oversight.

--Additional reporting by Braden Campbell and Vin Gurrieri. Editing by Marygrace Murphy.

For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.