Law Commons^™

The rise of the contingent and gig economies and of outsourced and subcontracted work has left many workers with insufficient bargaining power to successfully negotiate collective bargaining agreements with their direct employers. This problem is exacerbated by a statutory ban on worker picketing and boycotts of non-employers, or “secondaries,” even where those employers collude with direct employers on wage-fixing or the suppression of union activity; have monopsony power over direct employers; or have substantial indirect control over worker wages through contractual arrangements.

This Article is a crucial intervention in modernizing the labor law on worker picketing in the New Economy. …

In an era when administrative agency actions succeed or fail based on the thoroughness and rigor of their cost-benefit analyses and expertise, the 1940 statutory ban on hiring economists at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is a shocking anachronism. The ban, accompanied by the Board’s failure to solicit external expertise, severely limits the success of the Board’s actions on judicial review, its institutional competency, and its ability to assess the economic effects of its labor regulation in achieving a central goal of the National Labor Relations Act:equal bargaining power between workers and their employers that secures competitive wages and …