Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Restoring Reasonableness To Workplace Religious Accommodations, Dallan F. Flake

Washington Law Review

When Congress amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1972 to require employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious practices absent undue hardship to their business, it intended to protect employees from being forced to choose between their jobs and their religious beliefs. Yet in the decades since, courts have cut away at this right to the point it is practically nonexistent. Particularly concerning is the growing tendency of courts to read reasonableness out of the accommodation requirement, either by conflating reasonableness and undue hardship so that an accommodation’s reasonableness depends solely on whether it would cause the employer …

Washington's One-Size-Fits-All Unemployment Compensation Eligibility In Cases Of Voluntary Separation, Julia Fleming

Washington Law Review Online

Washington State’s Employment Security Act allows individuals who voluntarily left their jobs to be eligible for unemployment benefits if they quit their position with “good cause.” In structuring this Act, the state’s legislature has confined the definition of good cause to a one-size-fits-all list consisting of eleven circumstances. Consequently, if a situation arises that forces an individual to quit their job, yet does not fall into one of those eleven outlined circumstances, the Employment Security Department will disqualify the individual from receiving unemployment benefits. In comparison with other states’ unemployment laws, Washington’s system is quite limited, allowing no discretion under …

Could The Gig Economy Send Another Faa Disagreement To The Supreme Court?, Peter B. Rutledge, Jacob Bohn

Popular Media

The Federal Arbitration Act ordinarily obligates federal and state courts to enforce arbitration agreements, including in employment contracts. However, a nearly-century-old carveout in Section 1 exempts from the FAA's sweep contracts of employment for seamen, railroad workers or other individuals "engaged in foreign or interstate commerce." The "gig" economy has spawned increased litigation over the carveout's scope—specifically, whether it applies to certain categories of workers, ranging from Amazon drivers to Grubhub delivery workers. Disagreements are emerging among the federal courts, the law is uncertain in the Eleventh Circuit, and Supreme Court review may soon be called for.

The Invisible Web At Work: Artificial Intelligence And Electronic Surveillance In The Workplace, Richard A. Bales, Katherine Vw Stone

AI-DR Collection

Employers and others who hire or engage workers to perform services use a dizzying array of electronic mechanisms to make personnel decisions about hiring, worker evaluation, compensation, discipline, and retention. These electronic mechanisms include electronic trackers, surveillance cameras, metabolism monitors, wearable biological measuring devices, and implantable technology. These tools enable employers to record their workers’ every movement, listen in on their conversations, measure minute aspects of performance, and detect oppositional organizing activities. The data collected is transformed by means of artificial intelligence (A-I) algorithms into a permanent electronic resume that can identify and predict an individual’s performance as well as …

Short Strikes, Michael M. Oswalt

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.

An Af(Fur)Mative Defense: Using Intellecutal Property As A Defense To Employment Discrimination In Mascot Hiring, Taylor Farr

Arkansas Law Review

"Until a character becomes a personality, it cannot be believed. Without personality, the character may do funny or interesting things, but unless people are able to identify themselves with the character, its actions seem unreal. And without personality, a story cannot ring true to the audience." Walt Disney1 Mascots 2 are different animals. They bring some of our favorite characters from screens, packages, and comic book pages to life. Moreover, mascots serve a particularly important role on university campuses, offering a point of communal continuity3 amid inevitable organizational changes. Although university buildings, athletes, faculty, and staff will eventually change, a …

Realigning Federal Statutes: Contradictions Between The Federal Arbitration Act And The National Labor Relations Act, Denise Han

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Christopher Steele and Brendan Leveron were employees at a private

maintenance company named Pinnacle. Both Steele and Leveron

reported that Pinnacle allegedly forced them to work overtime without

just compensation—an allegation that, if proven valid, would

violate the Fair Labor Standards Act and California state law. They

also claimed that Pinnacle was guilty of unfair business practices,

retaliation and whistleblowing violations, and a failure to account.

Soon after Steele and Leveron filed these allegations, they discovered

that their predicament was not unique across the firm. In 2012,

they decided to represent their fellow employees in a class-action suit

which so …

Taking Employment Contracts Seriously, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

The essay, written for the Symposium in Honor of the Work of Charles A. Sullivan, examines the honoree's work on the employment contract. Rather than quickly moving past the common law of contract onto the many statutory regimes governing the workplace, Sullivan has repeatedly explored the nature of the employment agreement and the role of common-law doctrines in regulating this relationship. The essay explores Sullivan's expeditions into the common law and compares his work with those scholars working in the private law and New Private Law traditions. In addition, I argue that the contractual approach has failed to appreciate the …

The New Enforcement Regime: Revisiting The Law Of Employee Competition (And The Scholarship Of Professor Charles Sullivan) With 2020 Vision, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article, prepared for Seton Hall Law School’s 2019 Symposium on the scholarship of Professor Charles Sullivan, labels and critiques “the new enforcement regime” in employee mobility law. For centuries, employee noncompetes have been regulated primarily through the common law rule of reason. The last decade, however, has witnessed a surge in public initiatives seeking to restrict employers’ use and enforcement of these agreements. They include proposed legislation, regulatory undertakings, class action litigation, and state enforcement programs that seek reforms ranging from an end to the use of noncompetes with vulnerable workers to the outright prohibition of all forms of …

Illusory Conflicts: Post-Employment Clearance Procedures And The Ftc’S Technological Expertise, Lindsey Barrett, Laura M. Moy, Paul Ohm, Ashkan Soltani

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The federal government restricts what former employees can work on after they leave the government, and for good reason. These post-employment conflict restrictions attempt to address the “revolving door” problem, where employees take information learned from their position in government to unfairly advantage industry. But an unintended consequence of overbroad conflict rules is that they impede well-meaning, former federal employees from providing their knowledge and general expertise to other enforcement agencies with similar missions, such as those at the state level. This is playing out right now with FTC technologists, at a time when the agency—and, indeed, consumer protection agencies …