Law Commons^™

The Motive Power In Public Sector Collective Bargaining, Martin Malin

All Faculty Scholarship

In the private sector, George Taylor referred to the strike as providing the “motive power” in collective bargaining. A major reason behind the enactment of public employee collective bargaining laws is to reduce the interruption of public services from job actions. This was the case with the enactment of New York’s Taylor Law.This paper, written for a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Taylor Law and published in a special issue of the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal focused on the Taylor Law, examines what, in the absence of a right to strike, provides the motive power for …

A Tale Of Two Standards: Why Wyoming Courts Should Apply The Actual Substantial Evidence Standard When Reviewing Workers’ Compensation Cases, Michael C. Duff

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In Wyoming, as in almost all states, facts in contested workers’ compensation cases are developed within an administrative agency. When agency factual findings are challenged in court, the level of judicial deference applied to the agency is important and may be outcome determinative. Wyoming courts claim to apply the “substantial evidence” standard of review, often expressed as evidence that a “reasonable mind could accept” as supporting an agency determination. The Wyoming Supreme Court, however, also sometimes upholds workers’ compensation agency decisions that are deemed “not contrary to the overwhelming weight of the evidence.” It is unclear whether this latter formulation …

A Critical Examination Of A Third Employment Category For On-Demand Work (In Comparative Perspective), Miriam A. Cherry, Antonio Aloisi

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A number of lawsuits in the United States are challenging the employment classification of workers in the platform economy. Employee status is a crucial gateway in determining entitlement to labor and employment law protections. In response to this uncertainty, some commentators have proposed an “intermediate”, “third,” or “hybrid” category, situated between the categories of “employee” and “independent contractor.”

After investigating the status of platform workers in the United States, the authors provide snapshot summaries of five legal systems that have experimented with implementing a legal tool similar to an intermediate category to cover non-standard workers: Canada, Italy, Spain, Germany, and …

Holacracy And The Law, Matthew T. Bodie

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No law requires companies to have CEOs, officers, supervisors, chains of command, or even employees. But traditional managerial structures are so ingrained in our political economy that legal doctrines take them for granted. What if they were to disappear? Under holacracy, a new version of participatory management adopted at companies like Zappos and Medium, companies are replacing managers, organizational charts, and subordinates with governance circles, roles, and lead links. The promise of holacracy is a system of management that devolves responsibilities to teams, empowers workers to act freely within specified zones of authority, and energizes the entire organization around an …

The Behavioral Economics Of Multilevel Marketing, Heidi H. Liu

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Multilevel marketing companies (MLMs) - sales organizations that compensate independent consultants based on the sales and recruitment of other consultants - form a significant part of the American economy. Yet, MLMs provide little information to regulators and potential participants regarding potentially material information. Although MLMs are often compared to pyramid schemes, consultants argue that participation in a MLM allows them to make money outside of the traditional full-time labor force. This paper examines the law, economics, and psychology of MLMs, suggesting that MLMs may draw on prospective consultants' cognitive biases in persuading consultants to join and continue a MLM. Consultants …

The Future Encyclopedia Of Luddism, Miriam A. Cherry

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In common parlance, the term “Luddite” means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go. The attached book chapter is an alternate history (written circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign …

The Future Encyclopedia Of Luddism, Miriam A. Cherry

All Faculty Scholarship

In common parlance, the term “Luddite” means someone who is anti-technology, or maybe, just not adept at using technology. Historically, however, the Luddite movement was a reaction born of industrial accidents and dangerous machines, poor working conditions, and the fact that there were no unions to represent worker interests during England’s initial period of industrialization. The Luddites did not hate technology; they only channeled their anger toward machine-breaking because it had nowhere else to go. The attached book chapter is an alternate history (written circa 2500) that depends on the critical assumption that the Luddites succeeded in their industrial campaign …

How The U.S. Supreme Court Deemed The Workers' Compensation Grand Bargain 'Adequate' Without Defining Adequacy, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

During the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the U. S. Supreme Court issued a handful of opinions rejecting 14th Amendment constitutional challenges by employers to implementation of workers’ compensation statutes in the United States. Unknown to many, the statutes were largely the fruit of privately-sponsored investigations, principally by the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Association of Manufacturers, of European workers’ compensation systems during the first decade of the twentieth century. Some of those systems had been in existence since the 1870s and 1880s, and many employers preferred them to newly-emerging American employer liability statutes that retained …