Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Source & Solidarity, Sari Mazzurco

Michigan Law Review

Trademark law has become the new frontier of unionbusting. Companies like Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Medieval Times have brought unprecedented suits against their employee unions for trademark infringement in relation to their organizing activities. This sort of litigation puts courts in the difficult position of reconciling trademark protection with unionization rights. Their attempts to apply standard trademark doctrines in this context reveal a deeper problem: Current trademark law is incoherent when applied to labor unions.

This incoherence stems from a disconnect between current trademark law and the original purpose behind its application to labor unions. This Article recovers that basis …

Institutionalizing The Trade-Labor Nexus, Yueming Yan

Michigan Journal of International Law

While scholars have extensively explored the evolution of labor provisions in trade agreements, less attention has been paid to the institutional mechanisms that operationalize these provisions. This article addresses this gap by offering a comparative analysis of labor compliance models that are emerging across jurisdictions.

Recognizing that no institutional design is without trade-offs, this article applies the theory of comparative institutional analysis to evaluate existing models—not by asking whether they are (in)effective in the abstract, but: (in)effective compared to what? Specifically, it examines the strengths and limitations of various institutional mechanisms using benchmarks that matter to policymakers, including procedural efficiency, …

Expressive Association At Work, Elizabeth Sepper, James D. Nelson, Charlotte Garden

Michigan Law Review

Do employers have constitutional rights of expressive association? Two decades ago, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the Supreme Court held that a state law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation could not be applied to a membership organization that wished to exclude a gay leader. Today, courts face a rising tide of claims from employers, who argue that Dale constitutionally insulates their hiring and firing decisions from antidiscrimination law. A narrow majority of courts have denied such claims, holding that Dale does not apply at work. Increasingly, however, courts are siding with these employers, eliding any distinction …

Unwelcomeness Reconsidered: Adapting Sexual Harassment Law In The Long Wake Of #Metoo, Collin Christner

Michigan Law Review

The federal cause of action for sexual harassment in employment grew out of Title VII’s prohibition of workplace sex discrimination. In many circuits, for sexual harassment claims to be actionable, the plaintiff must show they found the referenced conduct “unwelcome.” Commentators have criticized that requirement since its inception; nonetheless, it has been wielded by courts that are either resistant or reluctant to abandon it. “Unwelcomeness” (or lack of evidence thereof) has been used to permit swaths of inappropriate workplace conduct— enshrining old, sexist stereotypes into America’s employment regulations. This Note evaluates the current approach to the unwelcomeness requirement and proposes …

The Basis Of The Labor Exemption Reconsidered, Sanjukta Paul

Articles

Broadly speaking, this symposium queries the question of expanding some actors’ coordination rights under antitrust law as a way of effectuating legal goals relating to “power relations.” I commend the organizers of the symposium for opening this conversation, for asking about the use of “collective bargaining” beyond the traditional labor domain, and for taking on the question in a creative way. These broader questions are essential, and yet my own article will (paradoxically, perhaps) try to contribute to this effort by going back to the core domain of the labor exemption itself—where, it turns

A Comparative Analysis Of The Lack Of Contractual Protections In Female Dominated Opportunities: Collegiate Competitive Dancers And Cheerleaders Compared To Ncaa Student-Athletes And National Pageant Organization Titleholders Compared To Employees/Independent Contractors, Abigail Church

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The lack of contractual protections and regulations throughout female-dominated opportunities is abundantly clear in the collegiate competitive dance & cheer and the national pageant organization titleholders. Collegiate competitive dancers and cheerleaders have no standardized contractual requirements regarding their commitment to an academic institution or their engagement in NIL opportunities. Their NCAA recognized student-athlete counterparts, on the other hand, have extensive regulations and protections in place for both categories of contracts. In the pageant industry, pageant titleholders have no protection against the all-too-common procedural and substantive unconscionability of their service agreements, which can be found in confidentiality and arbitration clauses. In …

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: Nearby Branch Closures And Small Business Growth, Benjamin Ranish, Andrea Stella, Jeffery Y. Zhang

Law & Economics Working Papers

Since 2010, the total number of commercial bank branches in the United States has decreased by about 20%. Do branch closures meaningfully affect economic activity? We investigate the impact of branch closures on small businesses, whose access to credit may be facilitated through local relationships with banks. Using exogenous variation in closures related to mergers and acquisitions, we show that the closure of nearby bank branches leads to decreased small business employment growth and entry while increasing business exit. Our results are robust to variations in our measure of employment, proximity, and construction of the instrument. We use subsample analyses …

Redesigning Post-Incarceration Employment Tax Credits: Making Work Opportunity Credits Work For Former Felons, Stephanie Hunter Mcmahon

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Former felons have a significantly higher unemployment rate than other groups of American workers. This unemployment increases recidivism as well as broader societal problems. Consequently, Congress enacted the Work Opportunity Tax Credit to encourage employers to hire former felons (and other groups of targeted workers) by offsetting their wages. For the credit to increase employment, employers must know whether potential workers would likely qualify for the credit before hiring decisions are made. However, the growing Ban the Box Movement seeks to defer or eliminate conviction history questions in hiring. After examining the credit’s stated purpose, its operating mechanism, and some …

Integrating The Workforce: A Proposed Expansion Of The Lane V. Kitzhaber Rule, Dean Farmer

Michigan Law Review

Sheltered workshops are workplaces that employ, and may legally pay subminimum wages to, individuals with disabilities. Though these workshops have historically been a large part of disability employment services in the United States, many policymakers have advocated for a shift from sheltered workshops to integrated disability employment services, in which individuals with disabilities work alongside other workers for an equal wage that meets or exceeds the minimum wage. In Lane v. Kitzhaber, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon applied Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to sheltered workshop programs, holding that states must …

Empirical Essays On Mobility-Restricting Covenants, Lorenzo G. Luisetto

SJD Dissertations

This thesis, which consists of four essays, uses empirical methods to study questions on the use of mobility-restricting covenants in business and employment contracts.

The first chapter investigates the spillover effects of the so-called “No-Poach Initiative,” an enforcement action launched by the Antitrust Division of the State of Washington Attorney General’s Office in January 2018 that led 237 franchisors to agree to stop using no-poaching clauses—i.e., provisions in franchise contracts that prohibit franchisees from hiring each other’s employees—nationwide. I document that approximately one third of the franchisors not targeted by the No-Poach Initiative removed the no-poaching clause from their franchise …

Labor Law, Ownership, And The Firm, Sanjukta Paul

Articles

In shaping economic coordination within and across both firms and markets, one significant action of law is to allocate privileges or rights between people or groups of people. These include the right to coordinate with other people or groups of people in particular ways regarding core economic decisions-a type of activity that is not always or in all circumstances legally permissible. An area that makes this more general action of law especially concrete is antitrust or competition law, with its collection of "exemptions." Antitrust's formal and informal exemptions quite directly allocate economic coordination rights, for particular kinds of activity, and …

#Employerstoo: Expanding Vicarious Liability For Sexual Harassment In Title Vii And Tort Law, Kassandra "Kassie" Fotiadis

Michigan Law Review

When an individual experiences sexual harassment through a workplace, she has limited options for recourse. One seemingly promising possibility is bringing a claim against her perpetrator’s employer. But this option—achievable through vicarious liability—has failed to realize its potential. In 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court established a standard to enforce vicarious liability for sexual harassment claims under Title VII. That standard, though, was limited in scope to begin with and has further narrowed over time. Common law principles also allow courts to hold employers vicariously liable for sexual harassment in tort. But few jurisdictions have adopted those principles, and there is …

Subjective Beliefs About Contract Enforceability, J. J. Prescott, Evan Starr

Articles

This article assesses the content, role, and adaptability of subjective beliefs about contract enforceability in the context of postemployment covenants not to compete (noncompetes). We demonstrate that employees tend to believe that even clearly unenforceable noncompetes are enforceable, including their own. We provide evidence for both supply- and demand-side stories that explain employees’ persistently inaccurate beliefs. Moreover, we show that believing that unenforceable noncompetes are enforceable likely causes employees to forgo better job opportunities and to perceive that their employer is more likely to sue them if they choose to compete. Finally, we use an information experiment to inform employees …

Labor Law, Ownership, And The Firm, Sanjukta Paul

Law & Economics Working Papers

Labor law has its own working theory of the business firm, not derivable from another area of law. This "theory of the firm," which the affirmative provisions of labor law are taken to both modify and preserve, is more overtly hierarchical than in other areas. This is true across the main functional domains of labor law: union formation; expressive and associational rights; and the scope of collective bargaining. A rich vein of existing scholarship deals with both hierarchy and deference to property within labor law. The arguments of this essay emerge from considering these aspects of labor law in conjunction …

Congress Could Soon Spell The End Of Employment Arbitration—But It’S Not All Good News For American Workers., Lewis L. Maltby, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Other Publications

Employment arbitration has become a dirty word on Capitol Hill. Congressman Hank Johnson claims that arbitration allows employers to "stack the deck against the little guy" for the 60 million employees bound by arbitration agreements. The Economic Policy Institute calls it an epidemic that is "undermining decades of progress in labor rights."

Reimagining The Deduction For Employee Compensation, Daniel Schaffa

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

U.S. businesses pay trillions of dollars in employee compensation, a substantial fraction of which is deductible for tax purposes. This deduction reduces the taxable income of businesses, ultimately lowering business tax burdens by hundreds of billions of dollars. With a few exceptions, the tax code confers the same deduction to a business for every dollar of employee compensation, regardless of whether that compensation goes to an employee earning millions or an employee earning minimum wage. This is consistent with a pure Haig-Simons income tax, under which any business expense incurred ought to be deductible dollar-for-dollar. But many, if not most, …

Don’T Forget To Like, Follow, And Regulate: An Argument For The Expansion Of Protections For Child Social Media Influencers, Caroline Waldo

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Child social media influencers, colloquially known as “kidfluencers,” have skyrocketed to fame alongside the growth of social media. However, traditional child labor laws do not consider online influencing “work” or these kids to be “child performers.” Thus, these children do not receive any form of legal protection for their presence online, leaving them open to exploitation and severe harms. This Note explores the lack of protection provided to kidfluencers, ultimately proposing a new federal labor law to expand child actor protections to kidfluencers. Part I of this Note provides a brief history of the landscape by reviewing landmark Supreme Court …

The First New Deal: Planning, Market Coordination, And The National Industrial Recovery Act Of 1933, Sanjukta Paul

Other Publications

In 1933, four years into the Great Depression, Congress enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in close cooperation with the Roosevelt administration. The central action of the statute was to facilitate price coordination across a given market or industry. Its rationale was to contain the destructive competition and below-cost pricing that were exacerbating the problems already roiling the economy as a result of the initial stock market crash, and subsequent cascading credit and liquidity crises. In addition to addressing the credit crisis directly through banking and monetary reform, the Roosevelt administration thus sought to buoy up purchasing power by …

The Preservation Of The Separate Spheres Doctrine In Congress And The Federal Courts, Arjun Parikh

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In Bradwell v. State, an 1872 decision upholding an Illinois law prohibiting women from practicing law, the United States Supreme Court reasoned that the law was justified because women belonged in the “domestic sphere.” While today’s sex-based workplace exclusions are not as explicit as they once were, women still face barriers to remaining in the workforce and advancing in the workplace despite the existence of major federal legislation in the areas of pregnancy discrimination and family leave policy. Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) in 1978 to stop pregnancy discrimination, but the PDA has not come close to …

Racism Pays: How Racial Exploitation Gets Innovation Off The Ground, Daria Roithmayr

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Recent work on the history of capitalism documents the key role that racial exploitation played in the launch of the global cotton economy and the construction of the transcontinental railroad. But racial exploitation is not a thing of the past. Drawing on three case studies, this Paper argues that some of our most celebrated innovations in the digital economy have gotten off the ground by racially exploiting workers of color, paying them less than the marginal revenue product of their labor for their essential contributions. Innovators like Apple and Uber have been able to racially exploit workers of color because …

Former Whistleblowers: Why The False Claims Act's Anti-Retaliation Provision Should Protect Former Employees, Jim Stehlin

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Since the Civil War, the False Claims Act has served as a tool to combat fraud perpetrated against the government. Early fraud by government contractors during the Civil War was quaint: contractors selling the same horse twice or filling a Union Army contract for sugar with sand. Today, the government recovers billions of dollars annually through actions under the FCA.

Essential to the FCA’s functioning are “relators,” private citizens who serve as whistleblowers incentivized to report fraud by receipt of a percentage of whatever amount the government recovers in damages. The government relies on relators to blow the whistle on …

How Might We Reimagine Transportation Technology To Combat Forced Labor: Conference Explanations And Recommendations From The Law And Mobility Program’S Annual Conference 2023, Brittany Eastman

Journal of Law and Mobility

The University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program (LAMP), a resource for scholarship about the legal implications of emerging transportation technology with a particular focus on connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), hosts an annual conference. The topic of the LAMP Annual Conference 2023 considered how we might reimagine transportation technology in a way that combats the systemic vulnerabilities that leave certain populations more likely to experience forced labor. This topic was selected because there are multiple lenses through which to consider the transportation equity outcomes for users, industry workers, and society at large; forced labor is just one …

The Good-Faith Doubt Test And The Revival Of Joy Silk Bargaining Orders, Brandon R. Magner

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The last fifty-two years have borne witness to the swift degradation and virtual irrelevance of the bargaining order. By the end of the twentieth century even pro-enforcement officials in the NLRB were acknowledging the difficulty of obtaining an enforceable bargaining order, and the remedy rarely appears these days in the agency’s published decisions.

This is not the product of the usual economic or political factors cited as reasons for the labor movement’s and its attendant regulating schema’s diminishment. Rather, the decline of the bargaining order can be explained almost entirely by the disappearance of the so-called Joy Silk doctrine from …

Liability For Toxic Workplace Cultures, Dana Florczak

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Title VII is meant to protect employees from discrimination and has historically been a crucial tool for creating social change in the workplace. But when considering modern-day workplace discrimination wrought by “toxic workplace cultures” defined herein, Title VII’s frameworks for confronting systemic discrimination prove outdated and ineffective. This Note proposes the codification of a new theory of discrimination under Title VII targeting toxic workplace cultures, with substantive and procedural elements working in tandem to better enable plaintiffs to collectively bring actions to hold employers accountable for fostering discriminatory environments. Part I defines toxic workplace cultures and walks through case studies …

Wrong Line: Proposing A New Test For Discrimination Under The National Labor Relations Act, Joshua D. Rosenberg Daneri, Paul A. Thomas

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

There has long been a consensus among scholars and union-side practitioners that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is under-enforced. As a result, employers often treat violations of the NLRA as a cost of doing business rather than a serious violation of a federal statute. Calls for reform have historically tended to propose legislative amendments to the NLRA to constrain employer conduct and impose greater consequences for discrimination violations. However, little attention has been given to improving the flawed legal test by which such discrimination is analyzed, Wright Line, 251 N.L.R.B. 1083 (1980), enforced 662 F.2d 899 (1st Cir. 1981), …

On Firms, Sanjukta Paul

Law & Economics Working Papers

This paper is about firms as an instance of economic coordination, and about how we think about them in relation to other forms of coordination as well as in relation to competition and markets. The dominant frame for thinking about firms--which has strongly influenced contemporary competition law as well as serving as a vital adjunct to the fundamental concepts of neoclassical price theory that guide many areas of law and policy--implicitly or explicitly explains and justifies the centralization of both decision-making rights and flows of income from economic activity on productive efficiency grounds. We have very good reasons to doubt …

Subjective Beliefs About Contract Enforceability, Jj Prescott, Evan Starr

Law & Economics Working Papers

This article assesses the content, role, and adaptability of subjective beliefs about contract enforceability in the context of postemployment covenants not to compete (“noncompetes”). We show that employees tend to believe that their noncompetes are enforceable, even when they are not. We provide evidence for both supply- and demand-side stories that explain employees’ persistently inaccurate beliefs. Moreover, we show that believing that unenforceable noncompetes are enforceable likely causes employees to forgo better job options and to perceive that their employer is more likely to take legal action against them if they choose to compete. Finally, we use an information experiment …

Enduring Exclusion, Daiquiri J. Steele

Michigan Law Review

Economic justice has long been a part of the civil rights agenda, and minimum labor standards statutes play a crucial role in eradicating the exploitation and subordination of historically marginalized workers. While statutes establishing labor standards are characterized as “universal,” their effect has been anything but universal. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, and those at the intersection experience disproportionate violations of labor standards laws concerning minimum wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health. Through legislative maneuvering dating back to the New Deal era, Congress carved out many female workers and workers of color from core protections of minimum labor standards …

Community Lawyering In Resistance To Neoliberalism, Jeena Shah

Michigan Law Review

A Review of An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles. By Scott L. Cummings.

Ability Apartheid And Paid Leave, Ryan H. Nelson, Michael Ashley Stein

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Ableism at Work: Disablement and Hierarchies of Impairment. By Paul David Harpur.