Law Commons^™

Disability Rights And Labor: Is This Conflict Really Necessary?, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

In this Essay, I hope to do two things: First, I try to put the current labor-disability controversy into that broader context. Second, and perhaps more important, I take a position on how disability rights advocates should approach both the current controversy and labor-disability tensions more broadly. As to the narrow dispute over wage-and-hour protections for personal-assistance workers, I argue both that those workers have a compelling normative claim to full FLSA protection—a claim that disability rights advocates should recognize—and that supporting the claim of those workers is pragmatically in the best interests of the disability rights movement. As to …

Labor And Employment Arbitration Today: Mid-Life Crisis Or New Golden Age?, Theodore J. St. Antonie

Articles

The major developments in employer-employee arbitration currently do not involve labor arbitration, that is, arbitration between employers and unions. The focus is on employment arbitration, arbitration between employers and individual employees. Beginning around 1980, nearly all the states judicially modified the standard American doctrine of employment-at-will whereby, absent a statutory or contractual prohibition, an employer could fire an employee "for good cause, for no cause, or even for cause morally wrong." Under the new regime, grounded in expansive contract and public policy theories, wrongfully discharged employees often reaped bonanzas in court suits, with California jury awards averaging around $425,000." Many …

The New Labor Law, Kate Andrias

Articles

Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today’s inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the …

Offshore Outsourcing And Worker Rights, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

For the workers in the Rust Belt of the United States, concentrated in Southern New England, Western New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, it doesn't make much difference whether their jobs are outsourced or lost to North Carolina or Mexico or China. In any event the sources of income that have existed for generations are gone and the economic and psychic pains are much the same. Nonetheless, for purposes of national policy it plainly matters whether the work is moving to another part of the country or is leaving the United States entirely. I am going to …

Foreword, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

Specialists in any field have a vested interest in their mastery of the subject. Expertise, after all, is their stock in trade. Assaults on the conventional wisdom can be unnerving if not discrediting. In the pages that follow, such an experience awaits all conscientious readers with a labor background who dare to expose themselves to Professor Charles Morris's provocative, iconoclastic, and ultimately persuasive arguments. He insists that a half-century of American labor law thinking has gone astray in failing to recognize the duty of an employer to bargain with a labor union representing less than a majority of the firm's …

Labor And Employment Law In Two Transitional Decades, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Labor law became labor and employment law during the past several decades. The connotation of "labor law" is the regulation of union-management relations and that was the focus from the 1930s through the 1950s. In turn, voluntary collective bargaining was supposed to be the method best suited for setting the terms and conditions of employment for the nation's work force. Since the 1960s, however, the trend has been toward more governmental intervention to ensure nondiscrimination, safety and health, pensions and other fringe benefits, and so on. "Employment law" is now the term for the direct federal or state regulation of …

The Once And Future Labor Act: Myths And Realities, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

In this provocative article Professor St. Antoine laments, "I cannot believe that a private-sector workforce that is only one-tenth organized is ultimately good for labor, for management, or for the whole of our society." His speech to the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers outlines the original purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, the reasons for the drastic decline in the percentage of the workforce that is unionized, and his suggestions for changes in the law that would encourage and promote collective bargaining.

The Nlra: A Call To Collective Bargaining, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

A century ago the legal specialty of most members of this audience would have been known as Master and Servant Law. By the time my generation entered law school, the Decennial Dgest had just added a new topic - Labor Relations Law. That of course dealt with collective bargaining and union-management relations generally. Now, a half century further along, we might seem to have come full circle, to judge by the lectures of the two eminent jurists who inaugurated this series. Both Abner Mikva and Richard Posner spoke on highly important and timely subjects, and yet those would be classified, …

Gilmer In The Collective Bargaining Context, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Can a privately negotiated arbitration agreement deprive employees of the statutory right to sue in court on claims of discrimination in employment because of race, sex, religion, age, disability, and similar grounds prohibited by federal law? Two leading U.S. Supreme Court decisions, decided almost two decades apart, reached substantially different answers to this questionand arguably stood logic on its head in the process. In the earlier case of Alexander v. Gardner-Denver Co., involving arbitration under a collective bargaining agreement, the Court held an adverse award did not preclude a subsequent federal court action by the black grievant alleging racial discrimination. …

The Changing Role Of Labor Arbitration (Symposium: New Rules For A New Game: Regulating Employment Relationships In The 21st Century), Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

A quarter century ago, in a provocative and prophetic article, David E. Feller lamented the imminent close of what he described as labor arbitration's "golden age." I have expressed reservations about that characterization, insofar as it suggested an impending shrinkage in the stature of arbitration. But Professor Feller was right on target in one important respect. Labor arbitration was going to change dramatically from the autonomous institution in the relatively self-contained world of union-management relations which it had been from the end of World War II into the 1970s. When the subject matter was largely confined to union-employer agreements, arbitration …

Contract Reading' In Labor Arbitration, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

A quarter century ago, I used the phrase "contract reader" to characterize the role an arbitrator plays in construing a collective bargaining agreement. This phrase has almost invariable been misunderstood to refer to reading or interpreting the contract. When I spoke of the "contract reader," it was in the context of judicial review of an award. My point was this: When a court has before it an arbitrator's award applying a collective bargaining agreement, it is as if the employer and the union had signed a stipulation stating: "What the arbitrator says this contract means is exactly what we meant …

The Law Of Arbitration, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The law did not look kindly on arbitration in its infancy. As a process by which two or more parties could agree to have an impartial outsider resolve a dispute between them, arbitration was seen as a usurpation of the judiciary' sown functions, as an attempt to "oust the courts of jurisdiction." That was the English view, and American courts were similarly hostile. They would not order specific performance of an executory (unperformed) agreement to arbitrate, nor grant more than nominal damages for the usual breach. Only an arbitral award actually issued was enforceable at common law. All this began …

Arbitration: Back To The Future, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

A strong new ideological current is sweeping through much of the Western World. At one extreme it manifests itself as a deep distrust of big government. In more modest form, it is a sense of skepticism or disillusionment about the capacity of big government to deal effectively with the problems confronting our society. In continental Europe today there is much talk of the principle of "subsidiarity," the notion that social and economic ills should be treated at the lowest level feasible, usually the level closest to the people directly affected. In the United States there is much talk of "privatization," …

Divergent Strategies: Union Organizing And Alternative Dispute Resolution, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, the so-called "Dunlop Commission," is focusing on three principal subjects: (1) union organizing, (2) worker participation in management decision making, and (3) alternative dispute resolution (ADR). I am going to concentrate on the last, but first I would like to say a few words about union organizing. After all, unionization and collective bargaining - and for that matter, worker participation as well - can fairly be viewed as special forms of alternative dispute resolution.

Supreme Court Philosophy On Labor And Employment Issues, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

It would not take a confirmed cynic to suggest that the title of this paper amounts to an oxymoron. That soft-hearted but tough-minded commentator, Florian Bartosic, and his collaborator, Gary Minda, came close to putting it in so many words: " [T]he Supreme Court lacks a consistent and coherent theory of labor law" (1982). My own view is somewhat different. First, lack of a consistent judicial philosophy is not all bad; at least it is better than a consistently wrong philosophy. Second, the vacillating theories of the Supreme Court tend to reflect the divergent attitudes of American society toward labor …

The Government And Union Democracy, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The desirability of union democracy is generally regarded today as a self-evident proposition. In this Symposium Clyde Summers treats it as a "fundamental premise." But there have always been reputable scholars who would support the thesis, in greater or lesser degree, that "democracy is as inappropriate within the international headquarters of the UAW as it is in the front office of General Motors."

Afterword To Chicago-Kent Law Review, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

A unifying theme of this Symposium is as old and enduring as the common law: when and how can a well-established, successful adjudicative institution be adapted to meet the demands of new and substantially different situations? There have been splendid triumphs of transference, such as Lord Mansfield's appropriation of the law merchant in the eighteenth century as a major building block of modem commercial law. There have also been embarrassing failures, like the abortive effort to transport American labor law concepts en masse into the alien British environment of the early 1970s. The common question confronting the participants in this …

Conflict Resolution In Industrial Relations, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

Only about one-fifth of the American labor force is unionized. With certain important exceptions, therefore, no formal machinery exists to resolve the various disputes that arise between a majority of the country's workers and their employers. The exception, which will not be treated in detail in this study, relate to (1) the right to organize into unions, which has been protected in most of the private sector since 1935 by the National Labor Relations Act and in the public sector since the 1960s by federal law and regulation covering U.S. Government employees and by statutes in about thirty states covering …

Commentary On 'Multiemployer Bargaining Rules': The Limitations Of A Strictly Economic Analysis, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Labor law bulks large on the docket of the United States Supreme Court. Yet never would I have included Charles D. Bonanno Linen Service, Inc. v. NLRB, dealing with the seemingly mundane issue of an employer's right to withdraw from multiemployer bargaining, in the select company of cases addressing such pulse-quickening subjects as affirmative action, picketing as free speech, and union antitrust liability. Professor Douglas Leslie's elegant and provocative article shows just how wrong I was--or at least just how far imaginative analysis can go toward seeing a world in a grain of sand. I lay no claim to expertise …

Prevention Of Antiunion Discrimination In The United States, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Nearly all rank-and-file employees in private businesses of any substantial size in the United States are protected by federal law against antiunion discrimination. The Railway Labor Act applies to the railroad and airline industries. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) applies to all other businesses whose operations "affect [interstate] commerce" in almost any way. Supervisory and managerial personnel, domestic servants, and agricultural workers are excluded from this federal scheme. Separate federal law covers the employees of the federal government. About thirty of the fifty states have statutes ensuring the right to organize on the part of some or most of …

Deferral To Arbitration And Use Of External Law In Arbitration, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

proper definition of the appropriate roles of arbitrators, administrative agencies and the courts depends in great part on the notion that, generally speaking, in labor relations, the interpretation and application of contracts is for arbitrators, and the interpretation and application of statutes is for the administrative agencies and the courts. Arbitrators deal primarily with contract rights and administrative agencies, like the NLRB and the courts, deal primarily with statutory rights. If that distinction is maintained, the problems of deferral to arbitration and the use of external law in arbitration can be more easily resolved.

The Collective Bargaining Process, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

A half century after the passage of the Wagner Act the right to bargain collectively remains a glowing but imperfectly realized promise for American workers. In recent years even the theoretical dimensions of the right have been markedly compressed. Yet collective bargaining was conceived in the widespread belief that both the cause of industrial peace and the welfare of the individual employee would be promoted if workers were given a genuine voice in determining their employment conditions. Why has the process apparently lost so much appeal? Does it still hold hope for the future?

In this paper I shall review …

Integrity And Circumspection: The Labor Law Vision Of Bernard D. Meltzer, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Bernard Meltzer has testified under oath that he "rarely take[s] absolute positions." The record bears him out. While his colleagues among labor law scholars often strain to demonstrate that the labor relations statutes and even the Constitution support their hearts' desires, the typical Meltzer stance is one of cool detachment, pragmatic assessment, and cautious, balanced judgment. The "itch to do good," Meltzer has remarked wryly, "is a doubtful basis for jurisdiction" -or, he would likely add, for any other legal conclusion. In this brief commentary I propose to examine the Meltzer approach to four broad areas of labor law: (1) …

Legal Barriers To Worker Participation In Management Decision Making, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Collective bargaining lies at the heart of the union-management relationship. It is the end and purpose of the whole effort to protect employees against reprisals when they form an organization to represent them in dealing with their employers. Collective bargaining is grounded in the belief that industrial strife will be checked, and the workers' lot bettered, if workers are given an effective voice in determining the conditions of their employment. My thesis is that federal law, even while placing the force of government behind collective bargaining, has so artificially confined its scope that the process has been seriously impeded from …

Individual Rights In The Work Place: The Burger Court And Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The Supreme Court, like other institutions, must play the part that the times demand, often with small regard for the personal predilections of its membership. The Warren Court and the Burger Court, in their respective contributions to the law of union-employer-employee relations, almost reversed the roles they might have been expected to assume. The major accomplishment of the Court in the labor area during the Warren era was a fundamental restructuring of intergovernmental relationships, while the Court's overriding concern throughout the Burger decade of the 1970s and beyond has been the defining of individual rights in the work place.

The Regulation Of Labor Unions, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

This year completes exactly a half century in the federalization and codification of American labor law. Before that the regulation of both the internal affairs and external relations of labor organizations was left largely to the individual states, usually through the application of common or nonstatutory law by the courts. One major exception was the railroad industry, whose patent importance to interstate commerce made it an acceptable subject for federal legislation like the Railway Labor Act.

The Role Of Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

In the early New Deal days, workers' placards in the coal fields proudly proclaimed, "President Roosevelt wants you to join the union." If not literally true, that boast was well within the bounds of poetic license. After the brief interval of federal laissez-faire treatment of labor relations ushered in by the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act of 1935 declared the policy of the United States to be one of "encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining." Employers, but not unions, were forbidden to coerce or discriminate against employees because of their organizational activities. …

National Labor Policy: Reflections And Distortions Of Social Justice, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

The impulse behind much of American labor law is profoundly moral. The sufferings and indignities inflicted on working men, women, and even children as the industrial revolution enveloped the western world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led many thoughtful observers to focus their attention on what was commonly called the "social question." Certain issues have been treated almost as if they posed questions of good and evil, when all they actually presented were problems of finding a proper balance of power between labor and management. This article shall develop these themes in several specific contexts.

Judicial Caution And The Supreme Court's Labor Decisions, October Term 1971, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

Labor law, like most other law in the making, is intensely political at its margins. On certain central themes, such as the right to join a union and freedom of contract, judges and administrators of widely varying outlooks may be able to reach a consensus. But along the frontiers of the law, no such accord can be expected. Conscientious decision-makers will inevitably differ with one another, depending on their diverse social values. They may even differ with their own prior positions, depending on shifts in the political climate. Moreover, if the decision-makers happen to be justices of the United States, …

The Consent Of The Governed: Public Employee Unions And The Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The major development in labor relations legislation during the past decade was the veritable eruption across the country of state statutes providing for the unionization of public employees. Wisconsin led the way in 1959 by 'imposing the duty to bargain on municipal employers. Ten years later, by my count, 22 states had passed laws authorizing some form of collective bargaining for either state or local employees, or both. An additional ten or so states have prescribed bargaining procedures for certain specified categories of employees, such as firemen, policemen, teachers, or public transit workers. All told, over two and a half …