US labor board prosecutors are ditching a Biden-era complaint that alleged Sean Penn illegally threatened his non-profit’s workers, the latest sign of a more management-friendly enforcement approach under President Donald Trump.
In a Friday filing, a regional official at the US National Labor Relations Board ordered the withdrawal of a complaint against Community Organized Relief Effort, Penn’s disaster relief organization. While the agency’s investigation had concluded that an email Penn sent staff contained illegal implied threats, “the conduct is isolated in nature,” with no “ongoing unlawful effect” on working conditions, regional director Danielle Pierce wrote in her order. Pierce said she could revive the case if there were new allegations brought against CORE within the next six months, according to the order viewed by Bloomberg News.
NLRB spokespeople did not immediately respond to inquiries. An attorney for CORE, Mathew Rosengart, said the case “was always meritless” and would have been rejected by any fair judge. “We are pleased they have finally seen the light and dropped it,” he said in an email.
The case involved an all-staff message from Penn sent to CORE staff in 2021, in which he said anonymous commenters on a New York Times story about CORE’s Covid vaccination operation at Dodger Stadium, including someone who complained about staff working 18-hour days, six days a week, were guilty of “reckless narcissism and self-indulgence.” Penn, the group’s co-founder and board chair, suggested that those who were not happy with their work should quit. He said: “In every cell of my body is a vitriol for the way your actions reflect so harmfully upon your brothers and sisters in arms.”
Under President Joe Biden’s NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency issued a complaint against CORE, alleging that Penn’s email was an implied threat of retaliation if employees publicized workplace concerns. An agency judge sided with CORE, ruling in 2023 that Penn’s email “cannot reasonably be interpreted as a veiled threat” that violates federal law. But last September, a trio of Democratic members of the NLRB overturned that ruling, saying the judge had applied the wrong standard and thus sending the case back for further consideration.
In Trump’s first weeks in office, he terminated Abruzzo and installed former NLRB member William Cowen as the agency’s acting general counsel. In a message firing Abruzzo and one of the NLRB’s Democratic members, the president said he wasn’t confident they could treat employers fairly, and in particular that they had not respected employers’ free speech rights.
The NLRB general counsel oversees the agency’s regional directors and has sweeping authority to determine what sorts of cases they do or do not pursue. Following Cowen’s appointment, CORE attorney Charles Birenbaum wrote the acting top prosecutor a letter urging the case against Penn’s non-profit be dismissed.
Citing a Trump executive order on agency accountability, Birenbaum said the NLRB’s actions in the case, including “the decision to go after a non-profit organization for an impassioned statement during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” were “emblematic of the concerns under President Biden with runaway, unaccountable federal agencies subject to the current public reckoning.”
An attorney for Cowen asked last month that the agency’s division of judges send the case back to a regional office for further consideration, and the day that motion was granted, Pierce issued her order dismissing the complaint.
If allowed to proceed, the case would have shown “that nonprofit workers cannot be threatened or coerced” into silence about their working conditions, said Daniel Rojas, the lawyer who had brought the case against CORE to the agency.
With assistance from Sophie Alexander.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
