By Daniel Wiessner

July 15 (Reuters) - A U.S. Senate committee on Wednesday approved President Donald Trump's nomination of a veteran management-side labor lawyer to provide a crucial third Republican vote on the National Labor Relations Board.

The Republican-controlled Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 12-11 to send the nomination of James Macy to the full Senate for a confirmation vote.

Macy has juggled multiple roles at the U.S. Department of Labor since last year, after a career in private practice spanning more than four decades.

The committee also approved Trump's nomination of David Prouty, who joined the board in 2021, and is its only Democratic member, for a second term. Under longstanding practice, the board, when fully stocked, has two Democrats, two Republicans, and a chair from the president's party.

The Labor Department and the NLRB did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment from Macy and Prouty.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Macy would give Republicans a 3-1 edge on the five-member board and allow them to roll back a series of Biden-era NLRB decisions that boosted union organizing ​and have been criticized by business groups.

By tradition, the board requires three members to vote in favor of overruling existing precedent, and Trump's other appointees, Scott Mayer and James Murphy, said during confirmation proceedings last year that they would ​not break with that practice.

Macy joined the Labor Department in September as the acting head of the Wage and Hour Division, which enforces federal wage laws, and was later named director of its Office of Workers’ ​Compensation Programs.

On the social networking site LinkedIn, Macy identifies himself as a senior counsel to the secretary of labor. Macy ​was previously in private practice representing employers and municipalities, most recently at Wisconsin-based von Briesen & Roper.

The five-member board lost a ⁠quorum of at least three members last year when Trump, a Republican, took the unprecedented step of firing Democratic Member Gwynne ​Wilcox, and it could not decide hundreds of pending cases for nearly a year. Meanwhile, about 16,000 labor complaints have piled up in recent years at ​short-staffed regional offices now run by Trump-appointed General Counsel Crystal Carey.

Wilcox sued and was briefly reinstated by a judge, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit paused and then reversed that ruling.

The U.S. Supreme Court last month upheld Trump's removal of a Democrat from the Federal Trade Commission, finding that a law shielding FTC commissioners from being removed without cause was invalid.

Wilcox's case turns on a nearly identical law applying to NLRB members that the D.C. Circuit also struck down. Her petition for Supreme Court review of that decision is pending.

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