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Full-Text Articles in Law
Is Labor Arbitration Lawless?, Paige M. Skiba, Ariana R. Levinson, Erin O'Hara O'Connor
Is Labor Arbitration Lawless?, Paige M. Skiba, Ariana R. Levinson, Erin O'Hara O'Connor
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Labor arbitration is often viewed as a more peaceful, productive, and private alternative to workplace strikes and violence. On the other hand, statutory laws are intended to protect all workers, and contract law default rules and rules of interpretation often serve a protective role that could be harmful if ignored in this private dispute resolution setting. To provide more insight into how arbitrators decide labor disputes, we utilize our newly crafted data set of hundreds of labor arbitration awards spanning a decade. Unlike prior data sets, our data are more inclusive: they include both published and unpublished awards as well …
Deflategate: What's The Steelworkers Trilogy Got To Do With It?, Anne M. Lofaso
Deflategate: What's The Steelworkers Trilogy Got To Do With It?, Anne M. Lofaso
Law Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
The Moral Dimension Of Employment Dispute Resolution, Theodore J. St. Antoine
The Moral Dimension Of Employment Dispute Resolution, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
Dispute resolution may be viewed from the perspective of economics or negotiation or contract law or game theory or even military strategy. In this Article, I should like to consider employment dispute resolution in particular from the perspective of morality. I do not necessarily mean "morality" in any religious sense. By "morality" here I mean a concern about the inherent dignity and worth of every human being and the way each one should be treated by society. Some persons who best exemplify that attitude would style themselves secular humanists. Nonetheless, over the centuries religions across the globe have played a …
Mandatory Employment Arbitration: Keeping It Fair, Keeping It Lawful, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Mandatory Employment Arbitration: Keeping It Fair, Keeping It Lawful, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
President Obama's election and the Democrats' takeover of Congress, including what was their theoretically filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, have encouraged organized labor and other traditional Democratic supporters to make a vigorous move for some long-desired legislation. Most attention has focused on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). As initially proposed, the EFCA would enable unions to get bargaining rights through signed authorization cards rather than a secret-ballot election, and would provide for the arbitration of first-contract terms if negotiations fail to produce an agreement after four months. The EFCA would apply to the potentially organizable private-sector working population; at …
Brief Amicus Curiae Of The National Academy Of Arbitrators In Support Of Respondents, 14 Penn Plaza V. Pyett, No. 07-581 (U.S. June 27, 2008), James Oldham
U.S. Supreme Court Briefs
No abstract provided.
Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
"Mandatory arbitration" as used here means that employees must agree as a condition of employment to arbitrate all legal disputes with their employer, including statutory claims, rather than take them to court. The Supreme Court has upheld the validity of such agreements on the grounds that they merely provide for a change of forum and not a loss of substantive rights. Opponents contend this wrongfully deprives employees of the right to a jury trial and other statutory procedural benefits. Various empirical studies indicate, however, that employees similarly situated do about as well in arbitration as in court actions, or even …
Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
My first visit to China, in 1994, was purely as a tourist, and came about almost by accident. In late September of that year I attended the XIV World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security in Seoul, South Korea. In the second week of October I was scheduled to begin teaching a one-term course in American law as a visiting professor at Cambridge University in England. Despite my hazy notions of geography, I realized it made no sense to return to the United States for the intervening week. The obvious solution was to continue flying …
Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Teaching Adr In The Labor Field In China, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
The editors have asked us to be quite personal in our ruminations on the future of comparative labor law and policy. For me, over the past several years, the focus has been on China. My first visit to China in 1994, purely as a tourist, was almost by accident. In late September of that year I attended the XIV World Congress of the International Society for Labor Law and Social Security in Seoul, South Korea. In the second week of October, I was scheduled to begin teaching a oneterm course in American law as a visiting professor at Cambridge University …
Gilmer In The Collective Bargaining Context, Theodore J. St. Antoine
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
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 …
Some Keys To The Nba Lockout, Grant M. Hayden
Some Keys To The Nba Lockout, Grant M. Hayden
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This article addresses two central issues regarding the 1998-99 National Basketball Association (“NBA”) lockout: 1) its impact on labor law doctrine and 2) what it reveals about the state of labor relations in the United States. The author concludes that, while the use of the traditional lockout weapon did not break any new ground in the area of labor law, the unique attributes of the NBA labor dispute provide insight into the condition of the American labor movement and public perceptions of unions. In particular, the author notes that the NBA lockout highlights both the dramatic differences in the power …
Mandatory Arbitration Of Employee Discrimination Claims: Unmitigated Evil Or Blessing In Disguise?, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Mandatory Arbitration Of Employee Discrimination Claims: Unmitigated Evil Or Blessing In Disguise?, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
One of the hottest current issues in employment law is the use of mandatory arbitration to resolve workplace disputes. Typically, an employer will make it a condition of employment that employees must agree to arbitrate any claims arising out of the job, including claims based on statutory rights against discrimination, instead of going to court. On the face of it, this is a brazen affront to public policy. Citizens are being deprived of the forum provided them by law. And indeed numerous scholars and public and private bodies have condemned the use of mandatory arbitration. Yet the insight of that …
Afterword To Chicago-Kent Law Review, Theodore J. St. Antoine
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 …
Prevention Of Antiunion Discrimination In The United States, Theodore J. St. Antoine
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 …
Reconciling Differences: The Theory And Law Of Mediating Labor Grievances, Deborah A. Schmedemann
Reconciling Differences: The Theory And Law Of Mediating Labor Grievances, Deborah A. Schmedemann
Faculty Scholarship
While grievance arbitration is the most common method of resolution of disputes arising under collective bargaining agreements, the author proposes that there is also a place for grievance mediation. The author compares mediation to arbitration and negotiation, and describes the strengths and weaknesses of mediation. She explains how mediation clauses in labor agreements could be enforced under section 301 of the LMRA, to protect rights created by those agreements, and proposes that mediation clauses be a basis for injunctions against strikes during the term of an agreement in certain situations. However, the author suggests that courts and the National Labor …
Integrity And Circumspection: The Labor Law Vision Of Bernard D. Meltzer, Theodore J. St. Antoine
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) …
Protected Concerted Activity In The Non-Union Context: Limitations On The Employer's Rights To Discipline Or Discharge Employees, Judith J. Johnson
Protected Concerted Activity In The Non-Union Context: Limitations On The Employer's Rights To Discipline Or Discharge Employees, Judith J. Johnson
Journal Articles
To the extent possible, this Article will be devoted to the situation in which there is no union or union organizational activity. It should be recognized that since the National Labor Relations Act does not distinguish between the statutory rights of union and non-union employees, many of the cases involving the protected concerted activities of union members are persuasive, if not binding, authority in the non-union context. The limitations placed by the Act on employers' rights will be delineated by an examination of the four factors upon which the courts have placed emphasis-definition of the term "concerted," proper purposes of …
Judicial Review Of Labor Arbitration Awards: A Second Look At Enterprise Wheel And Its Progeny, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Judicial Review Of Labor Arbitration Awards: A Second Look At Enterprise Wheel And Its Progeny, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
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 …
Judicial Caution And The Supreme Court's Labor Decisions, October Term 1971, Theodore J. St. Antoine
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 Labor Board And The Arbitrators, Theodore J. St. Antoine
The Labor Board And The Arbitrators, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Other Publications
The Labor Relations Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan held its second program of the current year, from May 27 through May 30, 1967 on Mackinaw Island, on a variety of subject matters with excellent presentations by the resource people conducting each of the various symposiums. Those who were unable to be present in this joint venture of pleasure and legal presentations will be able to at least vicariously "gather in the sheaves" of the legal wisdom disseminated during the program by the report contained herein. For those who were fortunate enough to attend plus those who didn't, …
Inducing Breach Of Agreement By Employees Not To Join A Labor Union, In Order To Compel Unionization Of Plaintiff's Business, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
Inducing Breach Of Agreement By Employees Not To Join A Labor Union, In Order To Compel Unionization Of Plaintiff's Business, Horace Lafayette Wilgus
Articles
In Hitchnan Coal & Coke Compazy v. John Mitchell, et al., (Dec. 10, 1917), 38 Sup. Ct. 65, the novel question was presented to the Supreme Court of the United States, as to whether or not members of a labor Union could be enjoined from conspiring to persuade, and persuading, without violence or show of violence, plaintiff's employees, not members of the Union,-and who were working for plaintiff not for a specified time, but under an agreement not to continue in plaintiff's employment if they joined the Union, this agreement being fully known to defendants,-secretly to agree to join the …