Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Antidiscrimination, Not Anti-Dei: The Real Story Of The Supreme Court's Recent Title Vii Precedent, Madeline H. Meth

Faculty Scholarship

For several years, my colleague and I had been litigating employment discrimination cases with facts that shocked our friends and family. For example, we fought Dallas County over a women-work-the-weekend policy that required women detention officers to work weekends while male colleagues took the weekends off. Likewise, we challenged the City of Cleveland when it moved our client, an emergency medical services supervisor, from the day shift to the night shift explicitly because he is Black. Then, in April 2024, in one of our client’s cases, Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled the …

Negligent Hiring: Recidivism And Employment With A Criminal Record, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This Article tackles a difficult legal and policy challenge— reducing the impact of criminal records on job applicants’ chances in a manner that does not spur more discrimination—by looking at how another area of law, tort liability, impacts employers’ decision-making. It uses theoretical and empirical methods to study the most common reason employers report being reluctant to hire workers with a criminal record: legal liability generated by the tort of negligent hiring. While the purpose of the tort is ostensibly to protect and make whole those harmed when an employee misbehaves in a foreseeable manner, I show that, in practice, …

Informed Applicants: Anti-Discrimination Enforcement Based On The Use Of Criminal Records, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

Navigating the labor market with a criminal record is treacherous. Countless job applicants will be turned down immediately after a potential employer learns they have had contact with the criminal legal system. Criminal records reflect and exacerbate long-standing racial and economic inequalities in the United States. Thus, the use of records in employment decisions will often implicate anti-discrimination laws. However, successfully enforcing these protections requires job applicants to, at minimum, understand why they were not hired. Many applicants never learn why they were not hired and thus will never be able to protect their rights. This Article argues that understanding …

Response: Work And Home, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

The idea of work, as it pertains to a place called home, as distinct from the market, has engaged and perplexed scholars for generations. Work in the home raises complicated issues that have accordingly drawn the focus of generations of scholars, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the material feminists of the late nineteenth century¹ to historians of labor such as Eileen Boris² and of law like Reva Siegel,³ from legal scholars like Fran Olson, Dorothy Roberts, and Robert Ellickson⁴ to social theorists like Friedrick Engels⁵ and architectural historians like Dolores Hayden,⁶ to name just …

Technology-Facilitated Labor Trafficking Power And Control Wheel, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

This wheel is based on the Article, "Digital Servitude", forthcoming in the Boston College Law Review.

Rebalancing Retirement: How 401(K) Plans Exacerbate Inequality And What We Can Do About It, Quinn Curtis, Leo E. Strine, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Incentives for individuals to save for retirement currently total 1.5% of US GDP. For that substantial investment, we get a system that actually deepens wealth inequality. The top 10% of earners capture 60% of the associated tax benefits, and employer matching contributions disproportionately favor the highest earners. Although defined contribution plans have long been subject to non-discrimination requirements aimed at ensuring that benefits do not accrue predominantly to the wealthiest participants, these rules have little bite. In an irony, we estimate that the entire 401(k) system would fail the non-discrimination test that every employer offering such a plan is expected …

Digital Servitude, Julie A. Dahlstrom

Faculty Scholarship

This Article addresses the phenomenon of digital servitude—forced labor practices facilitated by information and communications technology (ICT). With advances in technology and the internet, scholars and advocates have observed the rise of technology-facilitated human trafficking. Yet, disproportionate focus has remained on online sex trafficking, including commercial sex websites and online recruitment, despite ample research on work, technology, and digital surveillance. This Article seeks to fill this gap by shedding light on how technology intersects with involuntary servitude and forced labor claims in the United States. By analyzing federal pleadings in civil and criminal labor trafficking cases, it provides new insights …

Presuming Justice For Temp Workers, Andrew Elmore, Kati Griffith, Sachin S. Pandya

Faculty Scholarship

Workers need to know who their employers are. Who is responsible for remedying workplace dangers? Who can they sue for restitution when they are discriminated against at work, or do not get paid for all of the hours they work? Temp agency contracts complicate these seemingly simple questions. In workers’ rights cases involving “temps,” courts and administrative agencies often engage in protracted, resource-intensive joint employer inquiries to decide whether the temp agency clients share in employer obligations and liabilities with the agencies. This is the case even when the temp agency client has the key markers of an “employer,” such …

Mobility And Power In Temp Work, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Labor mobility is an underdiscussed determinant of temp worker power. Drawing on original interviews with professional and blue-collar workers who work as and alongside temps, this Article shows how businesses use staffing agencies to restrict the labor mobility of contingent workers. Staffing agencies limit worker mobility by imposing user- and worker-side contractual restraints while misrepresenting themselves to temp workers as their sole employer. They also exploit state-imposed mobility limitations by recruiting foreign nationals and people leaving incarceration and channeling them into their most precarious work. This enables clients to dismantle internal labor markets and to fill staffing shortages without raising …

Automatic Reaction - What Happens To Workers At Firms That Automate?, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge

Faculty Scholarship

We provide the first estimate of the impacts of automation on individual workers by combining Dutch micro-data with a direct measure of automation expenditures covering firms in all private non-financial industries over 2000-2016. Using an event study differences-indifferences design, we find that automation at the firm increases the probability of workers separating from their employers and decreases days worked, leading to a 5-year cumulative wage income loss of about 8% of one year’s earnings for incumbent workers. We find little change in wage rates. Further, lost wage earnings are only partially offset by various benefits systems and are disproportionately borne …

Is Distance From Innovation A Barrier To The Adoption Of Artificial Intelligence?, Jennifer Hunt, Iain Cockburn, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Using our own data on Artificial Intelligence publications merged with Burning Glass vacancy data for 2007-2019, we investigate whether online vacancies for jobs requiring AI skills grow more slowly in U.S. locations farther from pre-2007 AI innovation hotspots. We find that a commuting zone which is an additional 200km (125 miles) from the closest AI hotspot has 17% lower growth in AI jobs’ share of vacancies. This is driven by distance from AI papers rather than AI patents. Distance reduces growth in AI research jobs as well as in jobs adapting AI to new industries, as evidenced by strong effects …

Perpetuating Inequality: What Salary History Bans Reveal About Wages, James Bessen, Chen Meng, Erich Denk

Faculty Scholarship

Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Why? If employers can access applicants’ salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on employer wage posting and pay in a difference-in-differences design. Following SHBs, employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers, particularly for women (6.4%) and non-whites (7.7%). Bargaining behavior appears to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps.

A Second Look: Local Labor Markets And The Impact Of Ban The Box Policies After Criminal Legal Involvement, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the impact of labor demand on the employment and recidivism outcomes of released prisoners. Higher labor demand at release generates higher earnings and lower recidivism. Reduced recidivism persists after controlling for the observed labor market outcomes of the returning cohort, suggesting that labor demand impacts crime through channels beyond the direct formal employment of returning prisoners. Difference-in-differences based evidence suggests Ban the Box (BTB) policies delaying when employers can ask about criminal records improve labor market outcomes and lower recidivism for misdemeanor defendants. Evidence for felony defendants and returning prisoners is mixed but suggestive of similar patterns.

Interview With David Webber: Reflections On The Past, Present, And Future Of Labor's Capital, Alvin Velazquez, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

ALVIN VELAZQUEZ: Good afternoon! My name is Alvin Velazquez. I am an Associate General Counsel at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where for the last fifteen years I have given advice on bankruptcy, corporate law matters, and tech matters. I’m also an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law School where I have taught employment law and am teaching a seminar called Systemic Racism, Colonialism, and Bankrupt Governments.1 Before arriving at SEIU I worked as a litigation associate at several large law firms. I also admit, rather sheepishly, that I am one of the few graduates of Cornell in the labor …

Employer-Sponsored Reproduction, Valarie K. Blake, Elizabeth Mccuskey

Faculty Scholarship

This Article interrogates the current and future role of employer-sponsored health insurance in reproductive choice, revealing the magnitude of impact that employers’ insurance coverage choices have on Americans’ access to reproductive care, as well as the legal infrastructure that prioritizes employer choice over individual autonomy.

Over half the population depends on employers for health insurance. The laws regulating those plans grant employers discretion in what services to cover, with exceptionally wide latitude for employers’ choices about reproductive care services, like abortion, contraception, infertility, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). In their role as health care funders, employers pursue their own economic interests, …

Confronting Structural Inequality In State Labor Law, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Low-wage workers face a structural problem in seeking to improve their work standards: While companies have substantial labor market power to impose work terms and conditions, workers require affirmative state support to collectively press their workplace demands. But their employers can mobilize private capital and property rights, often with judicial deference, to fend off state intrusions into the workplace. While the National Labor Relations Act aims to resolve this structural problem by protecting the rights of workers to join unions, strike, and collectively bargain, employers, backed by judicial support for managerial prerogatives and property rights, can often leverage NLRA weaknesses …

Competing For Talent: Large Firms And Startup Growth, James Bessen, Felix Poege, Ronja Röttger

Faculty Scholarship

This paper explores the impact of large firms’ hiring in local labor markets on the salaries offered by startups and on startup growth and performance. We analyze firm data matched to help-wanted ads and find strong evidence of “crowding out.” A standard deviation increase in the share of ads posted by large firms raises startup pay offers by 5-10% for critical managerial, STEM, and sales jobs, and it reduces expected startup growth by 36%. Crowding is diminished by employee mobility and by spillovers to startups in closely related businesses. It is increased by big firm markups, which may have a …

Estimating The Impact Of The Age Of Criminal Majority: Decomposing Multiple Treatments In A Regression Discontinuity Framework, Michael Mueller-Smith, Benjamin David Pyle, Caroline Walker

Faculty Scholarship

This paper studies the impact of adult prosecution on recidivism and employment trajectories for adolescent, first-time felony defendants. We use extensive linked Criminal Justice Administrative Record System and socio-economic data from Wayne County, Michigan (Detroit). Using the discrete age of majority rule and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adult prosecution reduces future criminal charges over 5 years by 0.48 felony cases (↓ 20%) while also worsening labor market outcomes: 0.76 fewer employers (↓ 19%) and $674 fewer earnings (↓ 21%) per year. We develop a novel econometric framework that combines standard regression discontinuity methods with predictive machine learning …

The Long Shadow Of Inevitable Disclosure, Stacey Dogan, Felicity Slater

Faculty Scholarship

A growing body of evidence has highlighted the human and economic costs associated with contractual restrictions on employee mobility. News accounts describe abusive use of non-compete clauses to prevent low wage workers from seeking better options. Economists, meanwhile, have demonstrated that innovation and economic dynamism may suffer when employers can easily prevent their employees from changing jobs. While state legislatures have attempted to address these concerns by restricting employers' use of non-compete agreements, the Federal Trade Commission recently announced a plan to prohibit them altogether. As policymakers focus attention on contractual limits on employment mobility, however, a more insidious threat …

Mobilizable Labor Law, Scott L. Cummings, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

In the history of new labor localism, city-level living wage ordinances—emerging in the 1990s with Los Angeles leading the way—have generally been understood as a second-best, limited antipoverty device designed to raise wage floors, with only indirect effects on organized labor. Drawing upon original archival materials, this Article offers an alternative reading of the history of the living wage in Los Angeles, showing how it was designed and operationalized as a proactive tool to rebuild union density and reshape city politics. Doing so makes four key contributions. First, the Article theorizes and empirically examines the living wage as a pioneering …

Second Chances Part I - Federal Employment For Workers With Past Arrests Or Convictions, Benjamin David Pyle

Faculty Scholarship

In June 2021, President Biden signed Executive Order 14035 to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the Federal workforce. This order called for an evaluation and expansion of Federal employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated persons.

Before this executive order, in fiscal year (FY) 2020, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) formed a task force to identify vulnerable workers and determine ways to better serve them. The EEOC identified formerly incarcerated persons as one category of vulnerable workers due to the challenges they face in securing employment after their incarceration. In the FY 2017-2021 Strategic Enforcement Plan, the EEOC …

Putting Labor’S Capital To Work For Labor: Restoring A Worker-Centric Vision Of Fiduciary Duty, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

This report has two goals: first, to illustrate how the legal concept of fiduciary duty, designed to protect worker retirement funds, has been captured and distorted in ways that harm workers. Second, to propose means of restoring fiduciary duty to its proper purpose. The state-level fiduciary duties addressed in this report govern the investment of up to $10 trillion in assets and directly shape the retirements of 26 million working-class Americans. They are also just about the only source of worker voice in capital markets and corporate boardrooms. That is why a range of powerful business lobbies have distorted the …

Pov: Why The Crown Act Is Needed, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Shorter Faculty Works

Imagine, for one minute, that we live in an alternate universe where employer and school grooming policies that ban “unprofessional” or “faddish” hairstyles are routinely employed as a reason for firing, or refusing to hire, individuals with naturally straight hair. The normative standard for hair in this alternate universe is tightly coiled, curly hair—the kind of hair texture that actors like Denzel Washington or Issa Rae are born with, hair texture that is best suited for natural and protective hairstyles like locs, twists, braids, and Bantu knots.

The Economic (In) Significance Of Executive Pay Esg Incentives, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

The hottest topic in corporate governance circles today involves company commitments to and pursuit of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) initiatives in addition to the traditional pursuit of profits. One facet of this debate has to do with how to motivate executives to pursue ESG goals. Increasingly, companies tie executive pay to ESG performance, although even strong ESG advocates debate the advisability of doing so. This Article joins the fray by closely examining ESG-based CEO pay arrangements at a subset of companies with leadership positions on the Business Roundtable, an industry trade group that embraced ESG in a 2019 statement …

The Remainder Effect: How Automation Complements Labor Quality, James Bessen, Erich Denk, Chen Meng

Faculty Scholarship

This paper argues that automation both complements and replaces workers. Extending the Acemoglu-Restrepo model of automation to consider labor quality, we obtain a Remainder Effect: while automation displaces labor on some tasks, it raises the returns to skill on remaining tasks across skill groups. This effect increases between-firm pay inequality while labor displacement affects within-firm inequality. Using job ad data, we find firm adoption of information technologies leads to both greater demand for diverse skills and higher pay across skill groups. This accounts for most of the sorting of skills to high paying firms that is central to rising inequality.

Should Labor Abandon Its Capital? A Reply To Critics, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Several recent works have sharply criticized public pension funds and labor union funds (“labor’s capital”). These critiques come from both the left and right. Leftists criticize labor’s capital for undermining worker interests by funding financialization and the growth of Wall Street. Laissez-faire conservatives argue that pension underfunding threatens taxpayers. The left calls for pensions to be replaced by a larger social security system. The libertarian right calls for them to be smashed and scattered into individually-managed 401(k)s. I review this recent work, some of which is aimed at my book, The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon, …

Escaping The Allure Of Joint Employment: Using Fault-Based Principles To Impose Liability For The Denial Of Employee Statutory Rights, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

Using joint employment alone to impose liability requires an extension of the strict imputed liability theory embodied in respondeat superior. Employers, including incorporated businesses, under the common law are strictly liable for harms to their employees, as they are for harm to third parties, because of actions of their agents or other employees taken within the scope of their employment. The liability is strict because it does not depend on a finding that the employer, the principal, was negligent or otherwise at fault. Expanding liability through joint employment, even if based on a demonstration of joint control of statutorily protected …

Comment On Proposed Regulation: Prudence And Loyalty In Selecting Plan Investments And Exercising Shareholder Rights, David H. Webber

Shorter Faculty Works

In my view, while it is a significant improvement over its predecessor, the proposed rule’s persistent relegation of job creation/preservation to the status of mere “collateral benefit” is a mistake and undermines ERISA’s duty of loyalty. In reality, job creation and preservation are inextricably linked to fund financial health. Relegating that fact to a mere collateral benefit means trustees fail to consider the effect on a pension of investing in projects that eliminate the jobs of the fund’s own participants, or ignore the benefit of creating new jobs and thereby new pension contributors. This runs counter to President Biden’s executive …

Labor's New Localism, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Millions of workers in the United States, disproportionately women, immigrants, and people of color, perform low-paid, precarious work. Few of these workers can improve their workplace standards because the National Labor Relations Act ("NLRA") does not sufficiently protect their right to form unions and collectively bargain. Lacking sufficient influence in federal and state government to strengthen labor and employment law, unions and worker centers have increasingly sought to build power in cities. The shift to local labor lawmaking has delivered local minimum wage, paid sick leave, and fair scheduling ordinances covering millions of low-wage workers, as well as groundbreaking unionization …

Regulating Mobility Limitations In The Franchise Relationship As Dependency In The Joint Employment Doctrine, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Franchisors often impose exhaustive operational standards on franchisees, and enforce those standards by restricting the mobility of their franchisees and their franchisees' employees. But courts often ignore mobility limits when applying joint employer doctrine. This Article argues that courts and agencies should be more likely to find, and presume, that franchisors and their franchisees are joint employers under federal and state employment law based on proof that a franchisor restricts the mobility of franchisees or their employees. In so doing, this Article traces how the Chicago School's efficiency arguments in favor of relaxing antitrust law enforcement of vertical restraints developed …