[4] His father later was the college's men's basketball coach,[5] and young John grew up in Grinnell and attended public schools there.
[5] From April 1944 to 1946, he was the anti-submarine warfare officer on the USS Peterson, an Edsall class destroyer escort serving convoy duty in the North Atlantic.
[1][7] For several months after his appointment, he rented a room from fellow labor lawyer and friend Richard Lipsitz Sr.[8] Truesdale proved to be a highly regarded field examiner.
[6][11] President Jimmy Carter nominated Truesdale to be a member of the NLRB on September 26, 1977,[6] to fill the unexpired term of Peter D. Walther (who had resigned).
Pollitt had been special counsel to Frank McCulloch, chair of the NLRB during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and employer groups (such as the Business Roundtable and United States Chamber of Commerce) were adamantly opposed to him.
[17] The General Knit decision overturned Shopping Kart Food Market and restored the board's old rule as handed down in Hollywood Ceramics.
[22] By mid-September, Senate Republicans had adopted a much-enlarged strategy to bottle up large numbers of Carter appointees who would be able to serve past the end of the presidential term.
For example, in 1989, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland asserted that Reagan-era appointees to the board had tilted their decisions heavily toward management and had failed to impose harsh penalties on employers to violated the law.
[28] Truesdale defended Cracraft as utterly impartial, and said that the National Labor Relations Act's penalties were intended to be remedial and not punitive.
[29] During this period, Truesdale also pushed for the board to engage in a rulemaking regarding the Supreme Court's decision in Communications Workers of America v. Beck, 487 U.S. 735 (1988).
In October 1991, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray began criticizing the board and then-chair James M. Stephens for not adequately enforcing workers' Beck rights.
[33] In May 1992, for only the second time in its history,[34] the National Labor Relations Board undertook a regulatory rulemaking aimed at resolving the divergent, complex issues raised by the Beck decision.
[38] But after three and a half years of inaction on the proposed regulation, the board withdrew the rule on March 19, 1996—concluding that it could proceed faster through its more traditional case-by-case approach.
[14] The recess appointment came about due to a more urgent problem: the long-stalled nomination of William B. Gould IV, a Stanford University law professor.
[43] According to Gould, the administration also agreed to nominate Charles I. Cohen, a former NLRB attorney practicing with the law firm of Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart.
[14] According to Gould, Truesdale was a hard worker who produced decisions quickly, but who also adapted his views to changing political winds.
[58] Joining an opinion written by Gould, Truesdale held that the duty to bargain was not sundered by the employer's decision to change wage rates or benefit levels.
[59] In Keeler Brass Automotive group, 317 NLRB 1110 (1995), Gould convinced Truesdale and Cohen to change their vote and form a five-member majority in holding that a grievance committee is not a labor organization under the NLRA and hence cannot be a "company union" (even if employer-dominated).
[66] The strike began on August 12,[67] but despite the appointment of former Secretary of Labor William Usery Jr. as a special mediator on October 13[68] the World Series was cancelled for the first time in history.
[71] Two days later, the owners and the players' association both filed unfair labor practice (ULP) complaints with the NLRB, with each side claiming the other had not negotiated in good faith.
[77] But with no agreement even close, Usery hinted that he would recommend a legislative solution (perhaps removing the antitrust exemption, perhaps imposing binding arbitration) to the President.
[85] Although Gould was ready to cast the third and determinative vote, on the night of March 22 Usery asked him to hold off on any decision as the two parties were making progress.
[87][88] In what the Associated Press termed an "extraordinary" session,[89] the NLRB met on Sunday afternoon, March 26, to discuss Feinstein's request for a 10(j) injunction.
[91] In the end, after a two-hour meeting, Gould provided the critical third vote (joining Truesdale and Browning) to approve the request for injunctive relief.
But Michael J. Goldberg, Vice Dean at the Widener University School of Law, says that, while they differed on policy, their relationship was on the whole good and Truesdale's later account of his time on the NLRB with Gould is one of the more balanced ones.
[107][108] The same day, in NYP Acquisition Corp., 332 NLRB 1041 (2000), Truesdale convinced Member Sarah Fox to join himself and Hurtgen in significantly modifying the board's successorship rulings.
[113] With the NLRB only at three members due to resignations and delayed confirmations, Truesdale and Hurtgen joined to alter the board's successorship test by concluding that the subsidiary News Corp. used to buy the paper in 1993 was sufficiently different from the 1976 News Corp. subsidiary and with sufficiently different goals that it did not trigger the board's successorship duty-to-bargain requirements.
[115][116] And in Epilepsy Foundation of Northeast Ohio, 331 NLRB 676 (2000), the board extended the right to have a worker representative present during disciplinary hearings to nonunion employees.
As Bush's nominee for chair, Peter Hurtgen, was confirmed on May 15, 2001, but Truesdale remained on the board to help the agency maintain its quorum.
[122] Four days after the bodies were found, District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty fired six employees of Washington's Child and Family Services Agency, saying they "just didn't do their job.