Labor Law eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Rethinking Breakups","authors":"Hiba Hafiz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3892326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3892326","url":null,"abstract":"Trust-busting is once again a subject of national attention. And the attention is well-deserved: unprecedented levels of corporate concentration, firm dominance, and inequality demand robust debate about how antitrust solutions can ensure that our economy works for everyone. One simple remedy to “bigness” has stolen the spotlight within that debate—“breaking up” big firms into smaller ones to decrease corporate power and lower prices. But calls to break up firms from Big Tech to Big Ag have focused on how breakups could benefit consumers and, in some cases, small businesses. Absent from these debates is how breakups benefit or harm the workers and labor markets affected by firm dismantling. This Article is the first to focus on how firm breakups—and antitrust enforcement and remedial design more generally—can and have significantly impacted workers’ countervailing power and earning potential. Firm structure matters for worker power. Dismantling dominant firms can result in more firms competing for workers’ services, which can lift their wages. But it can also dismantle structures of worker power that have arisen to successfully counter dominant employers. A leading example, as this Article documents, is the devastating effect of the breakup of the Bell System in the 1980s on the Communications Workers of America, gutting union density within the telecommunications industry from 56% pre-breakup to 24% by 2001. Breakups, much like workplace “fissuring”, can decimate labor market institutions that advocate on workers’ behalf, but also have and can result in layoffs, increased obstacles for worker coordination, lower overall wage rates, and dramatic reductions in earned benefits, job security, and the quality of working conditions. The Article fills the gap in antitrust scholarship and policy debates that have ignored the effects of antitrust remedies on workers. It offers the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of these effects and argues that, for historical, theoretical, and empirical reasons, antitrust enforcers and scholars must attune their prescriptions and remedial mechanisms to ensure that antitrust remedies do not perpetuate the long history of antitrust’s alternating hostility or disregard for worker welfare. It begins by summarizing the debates around firm breakups and reveals their disregard for labor market competition and worker welfare. It then unearths case studies and social scientific analyses to assess the effects of breakups and offers both a theoretical and empirical overview of when breaking up firms can benefit or harm labor market competition and workers’ countervailing power against dominant employers. It concludes by proposing alternative remedies to monopolization and corporate consolidation that better secure worker welfare.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125161346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wage Boards for the 21st Century: Revisiting Sectoral Standard-Setting Mechanisms for the Workplace","authors":"Sara J. Slinn","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3488079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3488079","url":null,"abstract":"As existing labour relations and minimum standards regulatory systems have continued to struggle to ensure acceptable worker voice and workplace standards, attention has increasingly turned to whether broader-based or sectoral approaches can offer solutions. In the early 20th century, several countries established statutory systems of sector-based minimum workplace standard-setting as a response to unacceptable wages and working conditions. Key examples are the British Wages Council system, the Industrial Standards Act established in the Canadian province of Ontario, and the federal United States Fair Labor Standards Act. Although these three statutory systems arose out of broadly similar social and economic concerns, they reflect different conceptions or applications of tripartism, different perspectives on the role of voluntarism and collective representation and bargaining, and different approaches to sectoral workplace standard-setting. These systems also share important commonalities: all had roots in combatting sweated labour, characterized by fragmented and scattered workplaces and unacceptable remuneration and conditions of work, where – partly due to the characteristics of the work, workers and employers in these sectors – no voluntary collective negotiations could take root. These circumstances have clear parallels to today’s work and economy. This article examines these three systems, at the point at which each regime provided the most robust sectoral standard-setting procedure, as informative examples of a spectrum of approaches to tripartite sectoral workplace standard-setting. Out of this comparison, this article then offers some considerations for a modern approach to sectoral workplace standard-setting.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"217 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115981072","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Re-Thinking the Competition Law/Labour Law Interaction Promoting a Fairer Labour Market","authors":"I. Lianos, N. Countouris, V. De Stefano","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3465996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3465996","url":null,"abstract":"The spread of non-standard forms of work, including platform work, has created some friction between labour law and competition law, in particular concerning the collective bargaining of self-employed workers. This article aims to suggest a different, complementary rather than antagonistic, relationship between competition law and labour law. It initially explores the legal construction of the antagonistic relation between labour law and competition law, which is based on the conceptualisation of the two areas of law as separate and isolated legal fields. It explains that such conceptualisation is problematic as it leads to the risk of fundamental conflicts between the two disciplines and some uncertainty as to their respective scope, with the result that the level of labour protection may suffer. This calls for breaking the dichotomy and for ensuring a continuum of protection for various forms of labour, under both labour law and competition law. It thus puts forward concrete suggestions as to the strategies to be followed in order to achieve this goal.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128234442","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"House Committee on Education and Labor Hearing, ‘Standing With Public Servants: Protecting the Right to Organize’","authors":"Joseph E. Slater","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3439645","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3439645","url":null,"abstract":"This testimony was prepared for the House Committee on Education and Labor hearing, “Standing with Public Servants: Protecting the Right to Organize,” regarding the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act and the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, which took place in June 2019. These bills would provide minimum collective bargaining rights for public employees in the minority of states that do not currently provide such rights. In the testimony, I note that the other industrialized democracies provide collective bargaining rights for public employees generally, and indeed view them as a fundamental human right. Further, many employment laws in the U.S. apply to the public sector. The testimony also rebuts various objections to granting public employees such rights, and it describes the positive effects such rights can and do have.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125460892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Life After Janus","authors":"A. Tang","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3189186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3189186","url":null,"abstract":"The axe has finally fallen. In Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31, the Supreme Court struck down the major source of financial security enjoyed by public sector unions representing nearly half of the nation’s fifteen million union members. Countless press stories, law review articles, and amicus briefs have criticized and defended this outcome. \u0000 \u0000This Article has a different aim. Rather than re-litigating Janus, the question I ask is instead forward-looking: What’s next? Is there life for public sector unions after Janus? And if so, what might it look like? \u0000 \u0000In engaging these questions, this Article has three goals. First, I want to push back on the narrative that public unions have no choice now but to struggle on within a national right-to-work environment. That is certainly one possibility, but pro-labor states have available a range of legislative responses that may soften Janus’s blow or even negate it altogether. \u0000 \u0000One response is for pro-labor states to authorize public employers to reimburse unions for their bargaining-related costs directly. The standard objection is that direct government funding will undercut unions’ ability to advocate independently for workers. My second goal is to confront this objection head-on, with an argument that draws on an unlikely source: an analogy between public unions and public defenders. As it turns out, America’s woeful experience with indigent criminal defense teaches some powerful lessons about how not to fund entities whose entire purpose is to contest the government’s narrow self-interest. But it also suggests funding approaches that would raise no independence concerns at all. \u0000 \u0000That leads to my final and most significant objective: to propose model legislation for state lawmakers to implement direct reimbursement of unions. The proposal is revenue neutral for public employers and unions, and it is revenue enhancing for workers in light of nuances in the federal income tax. Readers interested in the nuts and bolts of the proposed legislation may wish to skip the first three parts of this Article (which make the case for why reimbursement is desirable) and start at Part IV on page 43. For convenience, a model bill is included in the appendix.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116849834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Thought Experiment About the Academic 'Billable' Hour or Law Professors' Work Habits","authors":"Eli Wald","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.3169547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.3169547","url":null,"abstract":"This essay imagines a world in which law professors tracked their work hours. It identifies some of the diagnostic attributes of the academic “billable” hour, explores the potential destructive dark side of timekeeping, and examines the nature of the relationship between the diagnostic and destructive qualities of recording academic time. Next, it introduces some of the political implications of recording academic time, and explores some of the normative discussions timekeeping might help inform. \u0000We know little about what law professors do and how they spend their time. While we know law professors’ teaching loads, we do not know how many hours they spend preparing for classes, interacting with students, or developing and grading assignments, let alone how they spend their time pursuing all of these activities. Similarly, while we know quite a bit about how much law professors publish and about the quality and impact of their scholarship, we do not know how they identify topics for inquiry, research, write, and publish. Finally, while we know a fair amount about law professors’ service commitments, such as their committee assignments, we do not know how much time and how they spend their time on service activities. In short, we know very little about law professors’ work habits. \u0000What we do not know matters. Timekeeping by law professors can generate useful diagnostic insights that may inform and improve legal academia. If all law professors were to record their time teaching, serving, and researching we would know more about what law professors do and how they do it and would be able to generate benchmarks and best practices, which may inform individual decision-making by faculty members regarding how to allocate their time, as well as institutional decision-making by law schools about how to assess and allocate their human capital resources and how to effectively train and mentor junior colleagues. \u0000Timekeeping, however, also has a dark destructive side, as it may undercut the intellectual and contemplative culture of legal academia and may help create disincentives for thinking, unintentionally triggering and contributing to a process of replacing standards of quality and professional excellence with managerial reporting of hours. Indeed, the two sides of timekeeping, the diagnostic and destructive, may be inherently intertwined such that the very act of keeping academic time may undercut the core mission and objectives of legal academia. \u0000Lawyers’ experience with the billable hour suggests some valuable lessons in terms of thinking about academic timekeeping. Unlike law practice, legal education need not and should not feature an inherent tie between recorded time and compensation. Distinguishing the diagnostic from the punitive by mandating academic timekeeping while liberating law professors from any compensation consequences attached to recorded time, may help address some of the concerns regarding the dark side of timekeeping. Thus, a ti","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116866202","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Labor Unions and Corporate Financial Leverage: The Bargaining Device versus Crowding-out Hypotheses","authors":"K. Woods, Kelvin Jui Keng Tan, R. Faff","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2497823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2497823","url":null,"abstract":"We examine the empirical relation between labor unions and firm indebtedness in the contemporary United States. Our identification strategy exploits two negative exogenous shocks in union power and the threat of unionization. Further, in the context of panel regressions, we develop a novel firm-level proxy for the bargaining power of labor using collective bargaining information from mandatory IRS filings from 1999 to 2013. Across a battery of tests, we document evidence in favor of a crowding-out hypothesis - namely, a substitution effect between labor power and financial leverage. Notably, this effect is more pronounced in firms in labor-intensive and unionized industries.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125719364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"2016 Supreme Court Commentary: Employment Law","authors":"J. Harkavy","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2833664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2833664","url":null,"abstract":"This article, the author's longstanding annual review of the Supreme Court's work in the employment area, examines in detail every decision of the 2015-2016 term relating to employment and labor law, with commentary on each case and additional observations about the Court's work in this term and the upcoming one. In particular, the author uses the latest term's decisions as a lens for examining broader aspects of the Court's jurisprudence, particularly in light of disruptive changes in the nature of the employment relationship and in the composition of the Court itself.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114774275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Freedom from Independence: Collective Bargaining Rights for 'Dependent Contractors'","authors":"E. Kennedy","doi":"10.15779/Z38XS7Z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38XS7Z","url":null,"abstract":"Myriad forms of service relationships drive the U.S. economy, with infinite and subtle variations in the terms and conditions of work and the legal rights of workers. Many independent contractors work beside employees doing the same job, for the same pay, but without the legal rights and protections of their co-workers. They are self-employed but lack the rights and privileges of self-employment; like employees, they lack individual bargaining power to negotiate with their “employer,” but unlike employees, they are barred by state and federal law from organizing with others similarly situated. These independent contractors are more accurately described as “dependent contractors,” a category of workers not contemplated by the framers of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).The wholesale exclusion of dependent contractors from the auspices of the NLRA has perpetuated an imbalance of economic bargaining power and labor strife the law was designed to redress. Given the repeated denial of labor and employment rights to dependent contractors by the courts, labor activists would need to craft legislative solutions in order to remedy the repeated abuse of dependent contractors.Amending the NLRA to include those dependent contractors whose relationships with employers warrant protection would be the simplest and most inclusive remedy. Given the current national political climate, that solution is arguably unlikely. Nonetheless, opportunities for enacting more inclusive legislation exist on the state level. This paper proposes the development of a state regulatory body, a dependent contractor relations board, similar to California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) to help reduce disparities in bargaining power between dependent contractors and their hiring party. Labor strife, worker exploitation, and lost tax revenue compel the need for greater state regulation of the dependent contractor relationship.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121768716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Social Media and the National Labor Relations Board","authors":"A. Levinson","doi":"10.4337/9781783479924.00033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/9781783479924.00033","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter addresses the increasingly important issue of how the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act) applies to postings by employees on social media. It argues that in large part the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) has correctly applied the age-old concept of protected concerted activity to new technological meeting places. The legal concepts at issue are founded in long-standing precedent. This chapter buttresses the claim that Board regulation of social media policies is consistent with past-practice and precedent by analogy to Board precedent governing employer policies on solicitation and distribution and on the wearing of insignia, which are similar to the social media policies currently being regulated. Despite differences in the use of an electronic meeting place from that of the water cooler, slight changes to the current doctrine, such as a clear explanation of when employees’ activity is for mutual aid and protection, would place the Board on even sounder footing.","PeriodicalId":215343,"journal":{"name":"Labor Law eJournal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124738006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}