A little more than two years ago, this newspaper ran a story asking the question, "Has the NLRB Lost its Way?" It was a fair question at the time, and one I'm happy to report no longer needs to be asked.

The National Labor Relations Board was established in 1935 as a part of the National Labor Relations Act, which guaranteed private sector workers the right to join a union, collectively bargain and engage in collective action like strikes. Until then, workers who stood up for themselves on the job could be met with violence, retaliation and more. Attempting to organize a union could be a death sentence.

The NLRA and its enforcement arm, the NLRB, put an end to the worst of that and ushered in a golden era of union organizing and worker empowerment that built the United States into the world's greatest economy.

But the last decade was a tough one for those of us who believed in the original purpose of the NLRB: leveling the playing field for working people. First, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama's nominees to the board for years, leaving vacant seats and preventing the board from doing its job of enforcing labor law.

Then, the last administration's nominees — McConnell continued to hold the Democrats' seats hostage — set about dismantling decades of established labor practices and allowing wrongheaded employers to run roughshod over the rights of their employees to organize and stand up for themselves.

They were pretty dark times to be a union organizer or a worker seeking the safety and stability of a union contract.

But, boy, what a difference a few years make. On President Biden's first day in office, he fired the NLRB's anti-union general counsel, Peter Robb, and he installed a friend of working families, Jennifer Abruzzo, in his place. He elevated the board's sole Democratic member, Lauren McFerran, to board chair and filled the empty seats with new members committed to the principles established in the NLRA back in 1935.

Today, the NLRB is once again standing by workers and the unions that represent them. Not every decision goes our way, but that's not the point. The NLRB exists to be a fair arbiter in disputes between workers and management, and it has been deeply biased toward big corporations in recent years.

We all know that when the fight is fair workers win. And this NLRB, thanks to some fantastic appointments by President Biden, is finally fulfilling its original purpose again: making sure that working Americans are able to exercise the rights at work afforded to them by the law.

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