Law Commons^™

Plant Closings And Reductions In Force, Margaret Hannon

Book Chapters

This chapter examines the effect of federal discrimination laws on permanent layoffs caused by plant closings and reductions in force (RIFs) and discusses the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act), Pub.L. No. 100-379, 102 Stat. 890 (1988), and the Illinois Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (Illinois WARN Act), 820 ILCS 65/1, et seq. This chapter examines cases in which RIFs have been challenged as violating an employee’s rights under federal age discrimination law, the legal standards applied by the courts in reviewing such challenges, and some particular problems that have arisen in the context of company …

Union Rights For All: Towards Sectoral Bargaining In The United States, Kate Andrias

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American labor unions have collapsed. Having once bargained for more than a third of American workers, unions now represent only about 6 percent of the private sector workforce. In the wake of new statutory and constitutional limitations, their presence in the public sector is shrinking as well. As unions have declined, the United States has lost a key equalizing institution in politics and the economy, INdeed, economic inequality is at its highest point since the Gilded Age, when unionization rates were similarly low. With the weakening of unions, the United States has also lost a key mechanism for protecting against …

Nevada Department Of Human Resources V. Hibbs: Universalism And Reproductive Justice, Samuel Bagenstos

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The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was the first bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton—just two weeks after he took office. Enactment of the statute was a longstanding goal of the Democratic Party. It also represented a legislative victory for what I will call feminist universalism—the notion that sex equality is best served by rules and policies that reject differentiation between women and men. Ten years after Congress enacted the FMLA, the Supreme Court upheld the statute against a constitutional challenge in Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs. The Hibbs Court, in a surprising opinion by …

Labor Unions And Title Vii: A Bit Player At The Creation Looks Back, Theodore St. Antoine

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During the debates over what became Title VII (Equal Employment Opportunity) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I was the junior partner of the then General Counsel of the AFL-CIO, J. Albert Woll. There were only three of us in the firm. The middle partner, Robert C. Mayer, handled the business affairs of the Federation and our other union clients. Bob was also the son-in-law of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, which gave us a unique access to Meany’s thinking. The Federation had only one in-house lawyer, Associate General Counsel Thomas Everett Harris. Tom was an aristocratic Southerner …

The Warn Act, David A. Santacroce

Book Chapters

Plant closings are devastating for workers, their families and the communities in which they live. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act ("the WARN Act" or "WARN") requires some employers to give their workers sixty days' notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. The purpose of the WARN Act is to provide workers with time to seek alternative employment or retraining and to plan for the transition phase after the layoff.

The WARN Act does not prevent employers from closing a plant; instead it only requires larger employers to give notice, subject to a number of exceptions and exemptions. …

The Law Of Arbitration, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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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 …

Labor, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Labor relations present three principal kinds of constitutional issues. First, to what extent does the first amendment protect employees’ efforts to organize labor unions and solicit support, and to what extent does it limit the power of unions over their members? Second, how does the doctrine of federal preemption restrict the states in regulating union and management activities? Third, what due process guarantees may employers and employees invoke in response to federal and state laws establishing new substantive rules and remedies in employment? Although the Supreme Court has never squarely?

Drafting The Dispute Resolution Clause, Whitmore Gray

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Providing in a contract for ways to resolve disputes that may arise presents a substantial challenge to the lawyer. In one sense, this is what a lawyer regularly does in contract drafting-anticipating misunderstandings or problems that experience has indicated are likely to arise, and trying to provide clear solutions in advance. When it comes to drafting a specific clause for the resolution of further disputes that may arise, however, many lawyers are at a substantial disadvantage. The task comes at the end of the substantive negotiations. The client does not want to focus on, or draw the other party's attention …

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

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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 …

Dispute Resolution Between The General Motors Corporation And The United Automobile Workers, 1970-1982, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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At the end of 1982 the active membership of the United Automobile Workers stood at 1.25 million workers, belonging to about 1,600 local unions in the United States and Canada. There were 1.14 million Americans and 115,000 Canadians. Women accounted for 170,000 memberships in the two countries. A fifth or more of the total may have been retired members. The UAW ranks as the largest manufacturing union, ahead of the United Steelworkers, but behind three unions representing truckers, school teachers, and retail employees. Substantially all the blue-collar workers in the domestic auto industry have been organized, the vast majority by …

The Legal And Economic Implications Of Union-Management Cooperation: The Case Of Gm And The Uaw, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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'Cooperation' sounds too much like 'cooption.' 'Collaboration' recalls the Nazis in occupied Europe. Words are important in labor relations. A word we like is 'jointness.' Another is 'involvement.'

With comments like those, a top United Automobile Workers official recently pinpointed one of the most significant and controversial developments in contemporary industrial life-the substitution of a new union-management attitude of conciliation and togetherness for the parties' traditional adversarial stance.

In this paper I shall briefly trace the rise of participative management, as the process is often called, using the experience of General Motors and the UAW as my prime example. The …

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 …

Boycott, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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A boycott is a group refusal to deal. Such concerted action is an effective way for society’s less powerful members,such as unorganized workers or racial minorities, to seek fair treatment in employment, public accommodations,and public services. But as the Supreme Court recognized in Eastern States Retail Lumber Dealers’ Association v.United States (1914): ‘‘An act harmless when done by one may become a public wrong when done by many acting in concert, for it then takes on the form of a conspiracy.’’

Picketing, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Picketing typically consists of one or more persons patrolling or stationed at a particular site, carrying or wearing large signs with a clearly visible message addressed to individuals or groups approaching the site. Some form of confrontation between the pickets and their intended addressees appears an essential ingredient of picketing. Congress and the National Labor Relations Board have distinguished between picketing and handbilling, however, and merely passing out leaflets without carrying a placard does not usually constitute picketing. What stamps picketing as different from more conventional forms of communication, for constitutional and other legal purposes, ordinarily seems to be the …

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.

Protection Against Unjust Discipline: An Idea Whose Time Has Long Since Come, Theodore St. Antoine

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The law seems able to absorb only so many new ideas in a given area at one time. In 1967 Professor Lawrence Blades of Kansas produced a pioneering article in which he decried the iron grip of the contract doctrine of employment at will, and argued that all employees should be legally protected against abusive discharge. The next dozen years witnessed a remarkable reaction. With a unanimity rare, if not unprecedented, among the contentious tribe of labor academics and labor arbitrators, a veritable Who's Who of those professions stepped forth to embrace Blades' notion, and to refine and elaborate it …

Protection Against Unjust Discipline: An Idea Whose Time Has Long Since Come, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The law seems able to absorb only so many new ideas in a given area at any one time. In 1967 Professor Lawrence Blades of Kansas produced a pioneering article in which he decried the iron grip of the contract doctrine of employment at will, and argued that all employees should be legally protected against abusive discharge. The next dozen years witnessed a remarkable reaction. With a unanimity rare, if not unprecedented, among the contentious tribe of labor academics and labor arbitrators, a veritable Who's Who of those professions stepped forth to embrace Blades' notion, and to refine and elaborate …

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. …

Judicial Review Of Labor Arbitration Awards: A Second Look At Enterprise Wheel And Its Progeny, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Logic, so the cliche goes, is not the life of the law. But logic is very much like the DNA of the law-the structural principle without which all is sprawl and muddle. In the last ten years a controversy has raged over the role of the labor arbitrator in issuing awards, and the role of the courts in reviewing and enforcing those awards. This controversy has largely taken the form of a continuing debate among scholars and practicing arbitrators at the annual meetings of the National Academy of Arbitrators. With due respect to the thoughtful and experienced persons who have …

The Right To An Adequate Income And Employment: A Reply To Professor Bernstein, David L. Chambers

Book Chapters

Bernsteins's Paper advances no constitutional arguments for requiring the government to ensure economic security for retarded citizens. His omission is justified not merely by the alternative focus he has chosen, but also by the absence of any sound or vendible constitutional arguments to advance. There remain, however, important roles for attorneys.

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

Book Chapters

Following is the text of an address by Theodore J. St. Antoine, Dean and Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School, to the annual meeting of the American Bar Association's Sect"ion of Labor Relations Law held in San Francisco, August 12-15, 1972. Full title of the address is "Judicial Caution and the Supreme Court's Labor Decisions, October Term 1971."

Interventionism, Laissez-Faire, And Stare Decisis: The Labor Decisions Of The Supreme Court, October Term 1969, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Following is the partial text of an address delivered at the August 10, 1970, meeting of the American Bar Association's Section of Labor Relations Law by Theodore J. St. Antoine, Professor of Law, University of Michigan, and Secretary of the Section of Labor Relations Law of the American Bar Association. The portion of the address reproduced deals with the Supreme Court's Boys Markets decision relating to injunctions against strikes in violation of no-strike contracts and the Court's H. K. Porter decision involving the NLRB' s authority to order a party to agree to a substantive provision in a collective bargaining …

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

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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 …

Judicial Valour And The Warren Court's Labor Decisions, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Lawyers who practice regularly before the Supreme Court are likely to prepare their arguments with a specific Justice in mind. The choice does not necessarily tum on who might be the swing vote in a given case. Often it is just a matter of which Justice can be relied upon, because of his particular interests and his insight, to search out the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing positions, and to see that all the hard questions are asked. In a labor case during the early years of the Warren Court, that would usually have meant Justice Frankfurter. Later on, …

The Rational Regulation Of Union Restrictive Practices, Theodore J. St. Antoine

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Power begets regulation. As union strength grew during recent decades, the federal laissez-faire policy of Norris-LaGuardia and the original Wagner Act gave way to increasingly tighter controls under Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin. Considering the favored position of economic efficiency in our national ethos, it is not surprising that a significant portion of the new controls were directed at union practices which were thought to impede the fullest utilization of employers' productive resources. From time to time, however, thoughtful observers have questioned whether our legal regulation of union activity was properly attuned to the actual needs and economic power of labor and …

Landrum-Griffin 1965-1966: A Calculus Of Democratic Values, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

One of the happier ironies of recent labor history can be found in the impetus given union democracy by the Landrum- Griffin Act. At the time the Act was passed, the thinking of disinterested observers had not yet crystallized on the merits of running a union's affairs democratically. It is probably fair to say that the main push in Congress for Landrum-Griffin and, particularly, its Title, "Bill of Rights" came from a conservative coalition which was less concerned with promoting the individual rights of working people than with blunting the effectiveness of labor organizations. There is hardly anything unique in …