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Successorship And Collective Bargaining Agreements In Business Combinations And Acquisitions, Richard G. Vernon

Vanderbilt Law Review

Mergers, consolidations, and purchases of assets are important and frequent business transactions in our economy' and involve a great deal of planning and negotiating by the enterprises concerned. Until recently,the rights of employees and their representative labor unions generally were not considered to be a factor in these plans. In 1964, however, the Supreme Court, in John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Livingston, held that common law privity-of-contract principles, which lower courts traditionally had invoked to preclude survival of employees' rights, did not necessarily apply to collective bargaining agreements. Wiley was a nonunion corporation that had merged with a smaller …