COLUMBIA UNDERGRADUATE LAW REVIEW
Re-examining Hoffman Plastic Compounds v NLRB under the Trump Administration Michelle Goldberg | Cornell University Edited by: Lorelei Loraine, Gabriel Gonzalez, Mia Xing, Charlie Huang, Samuel Braun, Chloe Tung, Yu Fang Abstract When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v NLRB1 in 2002, its decision reflected the post-9/11 national reckoning of American identity, prompting questions of inclusion and belonging that inevitably implicated immigration.2 The key decision of how immigration law affects workers’ rights was made against undocumented workers, who became ineligible to receive backpay, or the pay they would have received had they not been illegally fired under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Academia extensively examined the Hoffman case when the ruling first came out; however, this attention has faded with time.3 It was not until 2016 that immigration debates reemerged more charged than ever in response to the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies.4 Due to these restrictions, the current ramifications of Hoffman remain unclear. In the face of emerging threats to immigrants’ rights, there is a renewed need to untangle the lasting effects of cases like Hoffman that arose from the nation’s previous wave of xenophobia. This article reexamines the effects of Hoffman Plastic Compounds v NLRB since the beginning of the Trump administration in 2017. Particularly, I will focus on how the Hoffman decision has influenced other worker protection laws and how bureaucratic agencies enforce those laws. I aim to evaluate how Hoffman has impacted the rights of undocumented workers nineteen years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision and four years since Donald Trump assumed office.
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