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Full-Text Articles in Law
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Bargaining For Abolition, Zohra Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
What if instead of seeing criminal court as an institution driven by the operation of rules, we saw it as a workplace where people labor to criminalize those with the misfortune to be prosecuted? Early observers of twentieth century urban criminal courts likened them to factories.1 Since then, commentators often deploy the pejorative epithet “assembly line justice” to describe criminal court’s processes.2 The term conveys the criticism of a mechanical system delivering a form of justice that is impersonal and fallible. Perhaps unintentionally, the epithet reveals another truth: criminal court is also a workplace, and it takes labor …
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Several recent works have sharply criticized public pension funds and labor union funds (“labor’s capital”). These critiques come from both the left and right. Leftists criticize labor’s capital for undermining worker interests by funding financialization and the growth of Wall Street. Laissez-faire conservatives argue that pension underfunding threatens taxpayers. The left calls for pensions to be replaced by a larger social security system. The libertarian right calls for them to be smashed and scattered into individually-managed 401(k)s. I review this recent work, some of which is aimed at my book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, …
The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber
The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Two forms of labor’s capital—union funds and public pension funds—have profoundly reshaped the corporate world. They have successfully advocated for shareholder empowerment initiatives like proxy access, declassified boards, majority voting, say on pay, private fund registration, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. They have also served as lead plaintiffs in forty percent of federal securities fraud and Delaware deal class actions. Today, much-discussed reforms like revised shareholder proposal rules and mandatory arbitration threaten two of the main channels by which these shareholders have exercised power. But labor’s capital faces its greatest, even existential, threats from outside corporate law. This Essay addresses …
A Common-Sense Defense Of Janus: Forthcoming Changes In The Public Sector, Maria O'Brien
A Common-Sense Defense Of Janus: Forthcoming Changes In The Public Sector, Maria O'Brien
Faculty Scholarship
Many scholars and others have, for some time now, been calling attention to the alarming growth in post-employment and other benefits for unionized employees in the public sector. 17 A fairly well-understood phenomenon is thought to explain the inability of state and local governments to resist outsized demands from their public unions. As 18 Is and others 19 have argued, the central problem with public sector unions is that they find it easy to capture their employers (taxpayers) in ways that private sector unions cannot. The role played by often eager and feckless elected officials in this process has also …
A Few Observations About The Curious State Of Massachusetts Labor Law: Public-Sector Unions After Janus, Maria O'Brien
A Few Observations About The Curious State Of Massachusetts Labor Law: Public-Sector Unions After Janus, Maria O'Brien
Faculty Scholarship
This essay focuses on this hurried, even panicked response to Janus in Massachusetts and evaluates the likely outcome that encouraging a public union to treat member employees in one way and non-member employees in a distinctly less generous way will have for employees and the unions. I begin, in Part II, by noting (and explaining) the first and most apparent oddity in this story: why is an employer - i.e. the state - rushing to help its putative, arms-length bargaining partners? In Massachusetts, there are many different public-sector unions. School teachers, 13 firefighters,14 clerical workers, 15 state and local …