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Full-Text Articles in Law

Time’S Up: Against Shortening Statutes Of Limitation By Employment Contract, Meredith R. Miller Jan 2023

Time’S Up: Against Shortening Statutes Of Limitation By Employment Contract, Meredith R. Miller

Scholarly Works

Employers are increasingly adding clauses to contracts with employees that purport to shorten the statutes of limitation for employees to pursue claims against their employers (“SOL Clauses”). SOL Clauses are being imposed on employees in various stages of the contracting process. They have turned up in job applications, offer letters, arbitration clauses, employment agreements and employee handbooks. Where they have been enforced by the courts, the justification has been a prioritization of “freedom of contract” over any other policy concerns. This Article argues that, in the employment context, “freedom of contract” should not be prioritized over other competing concerns, which …


Structural Labor Rights, Hiba Hafiz Feb 2021

Structural Labor Rights, Hiba Hafiz

Michigan Law Review

American labor law was designed to ensure equal bargaining power between workers and employers. But workers’ collective power against increasingly dominant employers has disintegrated. With union density at an abysmal 6.2 percent in the private sector—a level unequaled since the Great Depression— the vast majority of workers depend only on individual negotiations with employers to lift stagnant wages and ensure upward economic mobility. But decentralized, individual bargaining is not enough. Economists and legal scholars increasingly agree that, absent regulation to protect workers’ collective rights, labor markets naturally strengthen employers’ bargaining power over workers. Existing labor and antitrust law have failed …


Labor And The Origins Of Civil Procedure, Luke P. Norris Jan 2017

Labor And The Origins Of Civil Procedure, Luke P. Norris

Law Faculty Publications

A series of changes within civil procedure over the past few decades—including the rise of private arbitration, the accompanying decline of public adjudication, and the erection of barriers to class actions—have diminished the economic power of workers, consumers, and diffuse economic actors. This Article demonstrates that avoiding these economic consequences was a central goal of those who crafted American federal civil procedure in the first place. Driven to action by the procedural issues involved in labor injunction cases, leading procedural reformers behind the modern regime strove to make American federal civil procedure sensitive to questions of political economy and designed …


The Myth Of Equality In The Employment Relation, Aditi Bagchi Mar 2009

The Myth Of Equality In The Employment Relation, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one’s level of income, leisure and discretion. For a variety of misguided reasons, contract law has been historically highly resistant to the introduction of status-based principles. Courts have preferred to characterize the unfavorable circumstances that many employees face as the product of unequal bargaining power. But bargaining power disparity does not capture the moral problem raised by inequality in the employment …


Commentary: Is It Time To Take The Broom And Really Clean House? A New Paradigm For Employee Benefits, Mary Ellen Signorille Jun 2004

Commentary: Is It Time To Take The Broom And Really Clean House? A New Paradigm For Employee Benefits, Mary Ellen Signorille

Chicago-Kent Law Review

No abstract provided.


The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien Hylton Jun 2004

The Changing World Of Employee Benefits, Maria O'Brien Hylton

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The employee benefits picture, at least for many plan participants and some plan sponsors, is a scary and bleak one. The number of workers with pension coverage is declining, health insurance rates are rising much faster than the rate of inflation, and the number of uninsured continues to rise as well. The decline in union density, the recent boost given by the U.S. Supreme Court to Any Willing Provider ("AWP") laws, and the deluge of recent benefits-related scandals are also all part of this landscape. This Article examines each of these issues, with a focus on reforms that would increase …


Employee Representation In The Boundaryless Workplace, Katherine V.W. Stone Jan 2002

Employee Representation In The Boundaryless Workplace, Katherine V.W. Stone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The New Psychological Contract: Implications Of The Changing Workplace For Labor And Employment Law, Katherine V.W. Stone Feb 2001

The New Psychological Contract: Implications Of The Changing Workplace For Labor And Employment Law, Katherine V.W. Stone

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In this article, Professor Stone describes the profound changes that are occurring in the employment relationship in the United States. Firms are dismantling their internal labor markets and abandoning their implicit promises of orderly promotion and long-term job security. No longer is employment centered on a single, primary employer. Instead, employees operate in a boundaryless workplace in which they expect to move frequently between firms, and between divisions within firms, throughout their working lives. At the same time, employers and employees have a new understanding of their mutual obligations, a new psychological contract, in which expectations of job security and …


Comparative Analysis Of Labor Mediation Using A Bargaining Strength Model, Alvin L. Goldman Jan 1994

Comparative Analysis Of Labor Mediation Using A Bargaining Strength Model, Alvin L. Goldman

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The comparison of different legal systems offers a number of analytical and research advantages, one of which is that it provides a laboratory for observing differences and similarities in the ways in which common regulatory and dispute resolution models operate in similar and dissimilar environments. This Essay uses that laboratory to illustrate how the bargaining strength model presented in Settling for More: Mastering Negotiation Strategies and Techniques can be applied in analyzing mediatory interventions and provide a better understanding of (a) how such interventions can be utilized most effectively, (b) when they are useful, (c) when they are superfluous, and …


Unemployment Compensation-Effect Of The Merits Of A Labor Dispute On The Right To Benefits, Robert H. Frick S. Ed. Apr 1951

Unemployment Compensation-Effect Of The Merits Of A Labor Dispute On The Right To Benefits, Robert H. Frick S. Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Every state and territorial unemployment compensation act contains a provision disqualifying persons from receiving benefits whose unemployment is the result of a labor dispute or some form thereof. In most states these provisions have been applied to deny benefits to striking or locked-out workers regardless of the merits of the particular controversy. A few states have adopted provisions permitting at least a limited investigation into the question of fault. It is the purpose of this comment to discuss the extent to which the merits of labor disputes are and should be considered in determining workers' rights to benefits.


Unemployment Compensation-Effect Of The Merits Of A Labor Dispute On The Right To Benefits, Robert H. Frick S. Ed. Apr 1951

Unemployment Compensation-Effect Of The Merits Of A Labor Dispute On The Right To Benefits, Robert H. Frick S. Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Every state and territorial unemployment compensation act contains a provision disqualifying persons from receiving benefits whose unemployment is the result of a labor dispute or some form thereof. In most states these provisions have been applied to deny benefits to striking or locked-out workers regardless of the merits of the particular controversy. A few states have adopted provisions permitting at least a limited investigation into the question of fault. It is the purpose of this comment to discuss the extent to which the merits of labor disputes are and should be considered in determining workers' rights to benefits.


Labor Law-Fair Labor Standards Act-Determination Of "Regular Rate" For Computation Of Overtime Pay, John A. Huston S.Ed. Jun 1947

Labor Law-Fair Labor Standards Act-Determination Of "Regular Rate" For Computation Of Overtime Pay, John A. Huston S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Previous to the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, respondent had paid its employees monthly salaries for work schedules which fluctuated from week to week according to the demands of business. After the effective date of the act, respondent sought to comply with section 7 (a), requiring the payment of one. and one half times the "regular rate" of compensation for hours worked above the statutory maximum, by adopting new employment contracts which guaranteed weekly salaries equivalent to the former compensation and fixed an hourly rate which, multiplied by the maximum hours permitted by the act and by one …


Company Unions Under The National Labor Relations Act, Burton Crager Apr 1942

Company Unions Under The National Labor Relations Act, Burton Crager

Michigan Law Review

Any discussion of the legal aspects of company unionism under the National Labor Relations Act necessitates some consideration of the economic and political background of this type of unionism. Periods of labor unrest have been particularly prolific in mushrooming the growth of company unions. During World War I, the National War Labor Board found itself faced time after time with strife between employers and "outside" unions over the existence of company unions, which frequently were engendered by the employers' antagonism toward bona fide unions. Upon the demise of that board at the close of the war, and the concurrent end …