Law Commons^™

Who Should Talk? What Counts As Employee Voice And Who Stands To Gain, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium piece responds to an article by Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt titled "Promoting Employee Voice in the American Economy: A Call for Comprehensive Reform." Professor Schmidt argues in favor of increasing employee voice in corporate governance. In this reply, Professor Bagchi distinguishes between "hard voice," "soft voice" and information rights as three variants of employee voice. She casts doubt on the material benefits from Professor Dau-Schmidt's proposals, which focus on hard and soft voice, to either employees or corporate stakeholders more broadly. The present focus of corporate governance on the relationship between shareholders and managers, to the exclusion of employees, …

Reviving Employee Rights - Recent And Upcoming Employment Discrimination Legislation: Proceedings Of The 2010 Annual Meeting Of The Association Of American Law Schools Section On Employment Discrimination Law, Scott A. Moss, Sandra Sperino, Robin R. Runge, Charles A. Sullivan

Publications

No abstract provided.

Taming The Employment Sharks: The Case For Regulating Profit-Driven Labor Market Intermediaries In High Mobility Labor Markets, Harris Freeman, George Gonos

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last quarter century, a profound restructuring of U.S. labor markets has occurred. Long-term job tenure, internal labor markets, and employer-sponsored benefits have waned under the pressures of neoliberal globalization. The trend is toward increasingly precarious, shorter-term, serial employment relationships that offer significantly lower wages, reduced job-related benefits, and formidable obstacles to the exercise of employment rights. This fundamental shift has moved so-called “non-standard” employment arrangements, once viewed as marginal, into the core economy. As a result, a remarkable array of profit-driven labor market intermediaries (LMIs) are now embedded in mainstream labor markets. Temporary help and staffing agencies, payrolling …

The Narrowing Of The National Labor Relations Act: Maintaining Workplace Decorum And Avoiding Liability, William R. Corbett

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Where There's At-Will, There Are Many Ways: Redressing The Increasing Incoherence Of Employment At Will, Scott A. Moss

Publications

Employment at will, the doctrine holding that employees have no legal remedy for unfair terminations because they hold their jobs at the will of the employer, has become mired in incoherence. State courts praise the common law rule as "essential to free enterprise" and "central to the free market," but in recent years they increasingly have riddled the rule with exceptions, allowing employee claims for whistleblowing, fraud, etc. Yet states have neither rejected employment at will nor shown any consistency in recognizing exceptions. Strikingly, states cite the same rationales to adopt and reject opposite exceptions, as a case study of …

Employer And Employee Rights And Responsibilities In A Networked Office, Ronald Tidd, Nancy Graber Pigeon

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Business

Internet-connectivity is having a profound impact on the workplace. Employees use it to access data and information from global sources, communicate with others instantaneously regardless of physical proximity, work anytime, anywhere, so long as they have a digital device connected to the Internet. Alternatively, the technology can be used to subject coworkers to objectionable material, violate workers' privacy, and convey the appearance of working when actually abusing Internet resources. This article discusses the existing laws regarding employee usage of an employer's Internet resources and employer monitoring of that usage. Thus, it provides a foundation for understanding a body of law …

Litigator's Thumbnail Guide To The Warn Act, David A. Santacroce

Articles

When large companies choose to lay off workers or close down plants without prior notice, they can be subject to extensive liability under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN), including 60 days backpay to all affected workers, daily fines to local government, and attorney fees generated during the suit. In the following article, the author presents the bare bones basics of WARN in order for employees and their advocates to understand how and when WARN applies.

Employer Prerogative And Employee Rights: The Never-Ending Tug-Of-War, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Where there are employees and employers, there will be employment relationships in need of mending. That reality is enough to guarantee that employment law will always be a warm, if not hot, area of the law. The article and notes on employment law in this issue demonstrate that the development of employment law continues apace.

The Warn Act, David A. Santacroce

Book Chapters

Plant closings are devastating for workers, their families and the communities in which they live. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act ("the WARN Act" or "WARN") requires some employers to give their workers sixty days' notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. The purpose of the WARN Act is to provide workers with time to seek alternative employment or retraining and to plan for the transition phase after the layoff.

The WARN Act does not prevent employers from closing a plant; instead it only requires larger employers to give notice, subject to a number of exceptions and exemptions. …

Working And Poor: The Increasingly Popular Practice Of Excluding Disabled Employees From Health Care Coverage, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

One might think, since passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA),' that the employment story for disabled employees or would-be disabled employees was cheerful, or at least improving. This may be true in so far as obtaining and retaining employment is concerned;' however, the ADA, because it permits employers and third-party insurers to continue to utilize traditional risk management techniques, has resulted in reduced or (in some cases) non-existent employee benefits for the disabled. At the same time, more and more employers are opting to self-insure under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA),3 in …

Keeping The Faith: The Problem Of Apparent Bias In Labor Representation Elections, John W. Teeter Jr

Faculty Articles

Any procedure requiring a “fair” election must honor the rights of both those who oppose and those who favor a union. The National Labor Relations Act (“Act”) is wholly neutral when it comes to that choice. Under the terms of the Act, employees have the right to form unions but also have the right to refrain from such activities. The National Labor Relations Board’s (“Board”) role in representation elections is to ascertain the employee's’ wishes concerning unionization, and not to influence that fundamental choice. The Board’s appearance of neutrality may be undermined through fraternization, the delegation of duties, and allegedly …

Inadvisable Advice: Limits On Employers' Counseling Of Employees With Regard To Unfair Labor Practice Proceedings, John W. Teeter Jr

Faculty Articles

The National Labor Relations Board frequently interviews or subpoenas employees to help determine whether an employer has committed an unfair labor practice. Many employers, however, have advised their employees that they may refuse to cooperate with the Board's efforts. Professor Teeter argues that such advice has an inherent tendency to coerce employees and to frustrate the Board's vindication of their statutory rights. After reviewing the inconsistent approaches tribunals have taken to this problem, the author recommends that employers be prohibited from counseling employees regarding their participation in the Board's proceedings. Professor Teeter concludes that the Board itself should be the …

Panel Discussion: Second Annual Corporate Symposium, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, John J. Murphy

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Panel Discussion took place as a part of the Second Annual Corporate Symposium, Beyond Collective Bargaining and Employment at Will: Discharging Employees in the 1990s, at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 9, 1989.

Drafting Wagner's Act: Leon Keyserling And The Precommittee Drafts Of The Labor Disputes Act And The National Labor Relations Act, Kenneth M. Casebeer

Articles

This Article analyzes the development of the National Labor Relations Act through the drafts of the original Act. The author traces the evolution of Senator Wagner's ideas through numerous policy and political battles to the passage of the NLRA in 1935. The author explores the development of the drafts and the historical context surrounding their creation to reveal the social theory of the drafters and illuminate previously unexplored undercurrents in the text of the Act itself. The author, through this novel approach to the NLRA, sets up a new way to view the 1935 Act, and evaluates subsequent amendments and …

Individual Rights In The Work Place: The Burger Court And Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Book Chapters

The Supreme Court, like other institutions, must play the part that the times demand, often with small regard for the personal predilections of its membership. The Warren Court and the Burger Court, in their respective contributions to the law of union-employer-employee relations, almost reversed the roles they might have been expected to assume. The major accomplishment of the Court in the labor area during the Warren era was a fundamental restructuring of intergovernmental relationships, while the Court's overriding concern throughout the Burger decade of the 1970s and beyond has been the defining of individual rights in the work place.

Union Decisions On Collective Bargaining Goals: A Proposal For Interest Group Participation, Eileen Silverstein

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Myth Of Labor Board Expertise, Julius G. Getman, Stephen B. Goldberg

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The National Labor Relations Board Voting Study: A Preliminary Report, Julius G. Getman, Stephen B. Goldberg, Jeanne B. Herman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

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 …