This is a ruling from an Administrative Law Judge, which basically functions as a strong recommendation for how the National Labor Relations Board should decide a particular case. ALJs are Article II “in house” judges that specialize in the law of one particular administrative agency. They don’t have Constitutional life tenure protections and mostly do claims processing work for the Social Security Administration.

The next step in this case is for a 3-member panel of the NLRB (a 5 member board appointed by the President, currently with 4 members) to decide whether to accept the proposed ruling of the ALJ or to substitute their own opinion of how the case should come out.

Orders of the NLRB are not self-executing, so parties can appeal an adverse judgement to the Circuit of Appeals of their choice and the NLRB can cross-petition for enforcement of their decision. The Federal courts have final say over questions of law like “are non competes a violation of labor law”.

The entire process takes several years to play out.