Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

State Joint Employer Liability Laws And Pro Se Back Wage Claims In The Garment Industry: A Federalist Approach To A National Crisis, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

The garment industry, one of the largest manufacturing bases in the United States, withholds millions of dollars annually from its employees in unpaid minimum wages. However, courts have not clearly addressed the question of whether the Fair Labor Standards Act, which establishes federal wage and hour laws, makes garment manufacturers and retailers liable for the minimum wage violations of their contractors. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the federal agency that enforces wage and hour laws, investigates few garment contractors, and collects little of the total owed back wages. Further, the DOL's relationship with the INS compromises its ability to …

The Intersectional Race And Gender Effects Of The Pandemic In Legal Academia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law …

Franchisor Power As Employment Control, Andrew Elmore, Kati Griffith

Faculty Scholarship

Labor and employment laws are systematically underenforced in low-wage, franchised workplaces. Union contracts, and the benefits and protections they provide, are nonexistent. The Fight for Fifteen movement has brought attention to the low wages, systemic violations of workers’ rights, and lack of collective representation in fast-food franchises. Given that franchisees can be judgment-proof and cannot set industry standards, the deterrence, remedial, and collective bargaining goals of labor and employment laws can depend on holding the franchisor (the brand) responsible under the joint employer doctrine. In a series of cases, however, a dominant approach has emerged that essentially foreclosed the possibility …

Labor Redemption In Work Law, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

People with criminal records must find and keep work to reintegrate into society. But private employers often categorically exclude candidates with criminal record histories, especially if the candidate is African American or Latinx. The conventional wisdom is that workplace laws offer little to address this problem. People with criminal records are not a protected class under Title VII, and many employers fear that hiring people with criminal records invites negligent hiring liability. Ban the Box privacy laws delay but may not deter overbroad criminal background checks

This Article challenges this standard account by shifting focus to the state in imposing …

Clarifying The Default For Anti-Discrimination Statutes, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The State Qui Tam To Enforce Employment Law, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the states' response to Epic Systems v. Lewis, which held enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) mandatory arbitration agreements that require employees to waive their participation in collective and class actions in employment contracts. Recent evidence shows that mandatory arbitration can erode access to justice for and deterrence of employment law claims. States in response are considering qui tam statutes, which assign the state interests in penalties for employment law violations to private enforcers in return for a bounty, to substitute for the loss of class action enforcement after Epic Systems.

These statutes can …

Automation: A Guide For Policymakers, James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, Wiljan Van Den Berge

Faculty Scholarship

Advancing technologies are increasingly able to fully or partially automate job tasks. These technologies range from robotics to machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, and are being adopted across many sectors of the economy. Applications range from selecting job applicants for interviewing, picking orders in a warehouse, interpreting X-rays to diagnose disease, and automated customer service. These developments have raised concern that workers are being displaced by advancing automation technology. Indeed, over 18 recent studies predict job losses from new automation technologies, including some predictions of massive job losses (Winick 2018). A large literature on worker displacement [1] …

Common Ownership And Executive Incentives: The Implausibility Of Compensation As An Anticompetitive Mechanism, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Mutual funds, pension funds and other institutional investors are a growing presence in U.S. equity markets, and these investors frequently hold large stakes in shares of competing companies. Because these common owners might prefer to maximize the values of their portfolios of companies, rather than the value of individual companies in isolation, this new reality has lead to a concern that companies in concentrated industries with high degrees of common ownership might compete less vigorously with each other than they otherwise would. But what mechanism would link common ownership with reduced competition? Some commentators argue that one of the most …

The Other Janus And The Future Of Labor’S Capital, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Two forms of labor’s capital—union funds and public pension funds—have profoundly reshaped the corporate world. They have successfully advocated for shareholder empowerment initiatives like proxy access, declassified boards, majority voting, say on pay, private fund registration, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio. They have also served as lead plaintiffs in forty percent of federal securities fraud and Delaware deal class actions. Today, much-discussed reforms like revised shareholder proposal rules and mandatory arbitration threaten two of the main channels by which these shareholders have exercised power. But labor’s capital faces its greatest, even existential, threats from outside corporate law. This Essay addresses …

Employer Losses And Deferred Compensation, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Most large public companies offer their executives the opportunity to defer the receipt and taxation of their salary or other current compensation until retirement or some other future date, and equity compensation, which also entails deferral of pay and taxation, constitutes a large fraction of the typical executive pay package. Conventional wisdom holds that employer net operating losses (NOLs) improve the joint economics of deferred and equity compensation (henceforth together "deferred compensation") for the parties. However, empirical studies provide little evidence of an association between employer NOLs and deferred compensation use. This paper focuses on two potential explanations for this …

Reforming Pensions While Retaining Shareholder Voice, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Public pension and labor union funds have been the driving force in diversified shareholder activism. They have also fended off attacks on jobs and proactively created jobs for fund contributors. These funds currently represent almost $4 trillion in assets over which workers have substantial control. That worker control - and the collective nature of defined benefit pension plans - is the necessary precondition for their shareholder activism. Both worker control and collective investment are directly threatened by the rise of defined contribution funds, particularly by well-funded efforts to promote the 401(k) in the public sector, the last bastion of the …

A Common-Sense Defense Of Janus: Forthcoming Changes In The Public Sector, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

Many scholars and others have, for some time now, been calling attention to the alarming growth in post-employment and other benefits for unionized employees in the public sector. ¹⁷ A fairly well-understood phenomenon is thought to explain the inability of state and local governments to resist outsized demands from their public unions. As ¹⁸ Is and others ¹⁹ have argued, the central problem with public sector unions is that they find it easy to capture their employers (taxpayers) in ways that private sector unions cannot. The role played by often eager and feckless elected officials in this process has also …

Using The Anglo-American Respondeat Superior Principle To Assign Responsibility For Worker Statutory Benefits And Protections, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

When viewed flexibly, not to find doctrinal rules, but rather to find insight from judges' collective judgment on social values, the common law may have particular value for modern policy makers. For instance, a common law insight could set policy makers in both the United States (U.S.) and the United Kingdom (U.K.) on a promising path for defining when workers are to be protected and benefitted by employment statutes. That insight reflects the underlying rationale for the common law that made relevant the initial distinction between employees and independent contractors - the common law of vicarious liability through respondeat superior. …

The Practice And Tax Consequences Of Nonqualified Deferred Compensation, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Although nonqualified deferred compensation plans lack explicit tax preferences afforded qualified plans, it is well understood that nonqualified deferred compensation results in a joint tax advantage when employers earn a higher after‐tax return on deferred sums than employees could do on their own. Several commentators have proposed tax reform aimed at leveling the playing field between cash and nonqualified deferred compensation, but reform would not be easy or straightforward. This Article investigates nonqualified deferred compensation practices and shows that joint tax minimization often takes a backseat to accounting priorities and participant diversification concerns. In practice, the largest source of joint …

Franchise Regulation For The Fissured Economy, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Franchise stores employ nearly nine million people in the United States. Many franchisors, which own trademarks that they license to franchisees, are among the largest, most sophisticated corporations in the United States. Yet franchise store employees are often paid below the minimum wage and frequently report unsafe workplaces and workplace discrimination.

The thesis of this Article is that widespread employment law noncompliance in franchise stores is symptomatic of the failure of employment law to recognize the measures that franchisors use to protect their brand in franchise stores. Franchisors often develop intensive relationships with franchisees and franchise store employees as representatives …

Op-Ed: California’S Most Powerful Voice On Wall Street? Its Pensions, David H. Webber

Shorter Faculty Works

The fight over public pensions in California is almost exclusively described as a dispute between people worried about tax hikes and public servants wanting to get paid what they were promised. But this is only part of the pension story — one focused on the “liability” side of the balance sheet.

Collaborative Enforcement, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

Labor standards enforcement in the low-wage workplace has long suffered from a lack of capacity, expertise and remedies that blunt the impact of public and private enforcers alike. The question of how to address these pathologies in state and local workplace regulation has gained new urgency with the virtual explosion of regional labor lawmaking and the deregulatory impulses of the new federal administration.

This Article identifies collaboration between state and local agencies and private, public interest organizations (“PIOs”) as one pathway to address these enforcement gaps, by amplifying the deterrent effect of public and private enforcement and 1 by improving …

Combating Discrimination Against The Formerly Incarcerated In The Labor Market, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Ifeoma Ajunwa

Faculty Scholarship

Both discrimination by private employers and governmental restrictions in the form of statutes that prohibit professional licensing serve to exclude the formerly incarcerated from much of the labor market. This Essay explores and analyzes potential legislative and contractual means for removing these barriers to labor market participation by the formerly incarcerated. First, as a means of addressing discrimination by the state, Part I of this Essay explores the ways in which the adoption of racial impact statements — which mandate that legislators consider statistical analyses of the potential impact their proposed legislation may have on racial and ethnic groups prior …

Ai And Jobs: The Role Of Demand, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

In manufacturing, technology has sharply reduced jobs in recent decades. But before that, for over a century, employment grew, even in industries experiencing rapid technological change. What changed? Demand was highly elastic at first and then became inelastic. The effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on jobs will similarly depend critically on the nature of demand. This paper presents a simple model of demand that accurately predicts the rise and fall of employment in the textile, steel, and automotive industries. This model provides a useful framework for exploring how AI is likely to affect jobs over the next 10 or 20 …

Recoupment Of Pension Overpayments: Equitable Liens And Meaningful Reform After Montanile, Maria O'Brien, Jeanne Medeiros

Faculty Scholarship

This short paper reviews the current state of the law governing recoupment actions for defined benefit ERISA plans and focuses in particular on actions against retirees who are without fault for the overpayment. The paper argues that the current practices of many plans which focus on recovering overpayments without taking the consequences to the retiree into account are not required by either ERISA or the IRS. The practices which include ceasing all pension payments, huge cuts in payout amounts and unlimited reach back even in cases where the plan fiduciary has clearly breached its duty to participants, cause tremendous harm …

The Future Of Fast Food Governance, Andrew Elmore

Faculty Scholarship

The Fast Food Forward movement has swelled into one of the largest protests by low‐wage workers in U.S. history, animating efforts at all levels of government to raise and enforce workplace standards. One such strategy is to hold fast food franchisors accountable as joint employers of their franchisees’ employees. In what may be a watershed moment, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman (NYAG) recently filed suit against Domino’s Pizza, the franchisor, for wage‐and‐hour‐law violations in its franchisees’ stores across New York State.

Fast food store employees report widespread wage‐and‐hour law violations, and the NYAG’s Domino’s lawsuit appears to confirm this …

Recognizing Women's Rights At Work: Health And Women Workers In Global Supply Chains, Erika R. George, Candace D. Gibson, Rebecca Sewall, David Wofford

Faculty Scholarship

The Guiding Principles mandate that businesses respect the human fights enshrined in the International Bill of Human Rights and in the International Labour Organization (ILO)'s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Due diligence processes and risk impact assessments are the main recommended means for ensuring compliance with companies' commitments to respect international human fights. Because OSH as a conceptual framework and regulatory order is not sufficient to identify the risk of health fights violations to women workers, we argue companies should not anchor their due diligence and risk assessment in OSH conventions and settle for a check-the-box solution …

Information Technology And Learning On-The-Job, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Economists disagree how much technology raises demand for workers with pre-existing skills. But technology might affect wages another way: through skills learned on the job. Using instrumental variables on 9 panels of workers from 1989 to 2013, this paper estimates that workers who use information technology (IT) have wage growth that is about 2% greater than non-IT workers, all else equal, implying substantial learning. This effect persists over time, implying sustained productivity growth from IT. Also, it benefits workers both with and without college degrees. Because many more college-educated workers use IT, college wages grow faster, contributing to economic inequality.

How Computer Automation Affects Occupations: Technology, Jobs, And Skills, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

This paper investigates basic relationships between technology and occupations. Building a general occupational model, I look at detailed occupations since 1980 to explore whether computers are related to job losses or other sources of wage inequality. Occupations that use computers grow faster, not slower. This is true even for highly routine and mid-wage occupations. Estimates reject computers as a source of significant net technological unemployment or job polarization. But computerized occupations substitute for other occupations, shifting employment and requiring new skills. Because new skills are costly to learn, computer use is associated with substantially greater within-occupation wage inequality.

Friedrichs And The Move Toward Private Ordering Of Public Employee Wages And Benefits, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

In its recent Harris v. Quinn opinion the U.S. Supreme Court (in particular Justice Alito) seemed to welcome a future opportunity to reconsider the 1977 landmark Abood decision in which public sector closed shop employees were not required to join a union but could be subject to fees that cover the costs of “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment purposes.” Supporters of the Abood approach argue that it is a reasonable compromise that prevents non-members from free riding on the union’s efforts (i.e. enjoying the wages and benefits negotiated by the union without sharing the costs incurred.) Detractors and …

Confusion On The Court: Distinguishing Disparate Treatment From Disparate Impact In Young V. Ups And Eeoc V. Abercrombie & Fitch, Inc., Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

In two decisions in the 2014-2015 Term, Young v. United Parcel Service, Inc., and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch, Inc., the Court seemed to give contradictory answers to an important unresolved conceptual definitional question: Does disparate treatment include assigning members of a protected group based on their protected status to a larger disfavored group that is defined by neutral principles and that includes others who are not members of the protected group? Or does such assignment have only a disparate impact on the protected status group?

In Young, the first of these decisions, all members of the …

A More Fundamental Distinction For The Contemporary Economy Between Employee And Independent Contractor Status, Michael C. Harper

Faculty Scholarship

The common law remains an intellectual battle ground in Anglo-American legal systems, even in the current age of statutes. This is true in significant part because the common law provides legitimacy for arguments actually based on policy, ideology, and interest. It also is true because of the common law's malleability and related susceptibility to significantly varied interpretations.

Mere contention over the meaning of the common law to provide legitimacy for modern statutes is most often not productive of sensible policy, however. It generally produces no more than reified doctrine unsuited for problems the common law was not framed to solve. …

Introduction To Thinking About A Post-Aca World: Litigation, Cost Shifting And Enforcement Of Statutory Rights, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

At its annual gathering in 2016, members of the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation and Law, Medicine and Healthcare Sections of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) jointly sponsored a discussion of the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) following the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell.' What follows are the papers generated for the panel discussion. The panelists² were asked to evaluate the future of the ACA from a distinct perspective.

Recent Cases: Eeoc V. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc.: Religious Accommodation In The Workplace, Elizabeth King

Faculty Scholarship

In EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores, Inc., the plaintiff, Samantha Elauf, was rejected from a sales clerk position because her headscarf clashed with Abercrombie & Fitch’s employee dress code.¹ This code, Abercrombie’s “Look Policy,” required all employees to dress in a “classic East Coast collegiate style” and prohibited “caps.”² However, Elauf, a practicing Muslim, wore a headscarf (or “hijab”) as a representation and obligation of her religion.³ After Abercrombie rejected her employment application, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) sued the company on Elauf’s behalf, alleging a Title VII violation for failure to accommodate a …

After Tackett: Incomplete Contracts For Post-Employment Healthcare, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the recent U.S. Supreme Court retiree health care decision in Tackett v. M & G Polymers and focuses, in particular, on the ostensibly odd silence with respect to a critical contract term — whether the parties in fact agreed that these benefits were vested. Although the union in Tackett insisted these welfare benefits were clearly intended to vest and the employer now asserts they can be modified at any time, the collective bargaining agreement and supporting documents are ambiguous on this question. This paper examines how and why this “silence” persisted for so many decades and concludes …