Nomination News. With control of the U.S. Senate in 2023 up for grabs, the Biden administration continues its push to fill agency leadership positions. Late last week, the Senate confirmed attorney Lisa Gomez to run the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) Employee Benefits Security Administration. The vote represented a second chance for Gomez: in June of this year, her confirmation vote failed when Vice President Kamala Harris was unavailable to break a tie vote. Still awaiting confirmation are Jessica Looman (nominated to serve as administrator of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division) and Karla Gilbride (nominated to serve as general counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)), but as the Buzz recently reported, their votes keep getting postponed. Finally, there is no update on the status of EEOC commissioner nominee Kalpana Kotagal.

SCOTUS to Review Union’s Destruction of Employer’s Property. This week, the Supreme Court of the United States kicked off its 2022–2023 term (more on that below). On the first day of its new term, the Court agreed to hear a case concerning whether the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) preempts an employer’s claim that a union intentionally destroyed its property during a strike. The employer in the case, a ready-mix concrete company, sued the union representing its workers alleging that the union deliberately timed its work stoppage to occur shortly after the employer’s mixing trucks were loaded for delivery. As a result, the...

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