Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Still “Snowing” In The Sunshine State: An Analysis Of And Potential Solutions To The Lack Of Protection From Employer Retaliation For Florida Lawyers Who Adhere To The State’S Mandatory Reporting Of Professional Misconduct Rule, Jason A. Anon

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Consumer Imaginary: Labor Rights, Human Rights, And Citizen-Consumers In The Global Supply Chain, Kevin Kolben

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Consumers are increasingly demanding that the goods and services they consume be produced in a way that meets their social expectations. By extension, they are exhibiting greater willingness to pay more at the cash register for products made in good working conditions, and they are willing to punish companies that do not satisfy these expectations. Driving these "citizen-consumers" is what this Article terms the "consumer imaginary," which is defined as the narratives that consumers tell themselves about the people that make their things--people whom consumers will likely never meet, and whose lived experiences are distant from their own. Policymakers have …

Redefining Workplace Speech After Janus, Theo A. Lesczynski

Northwestern University Law Review

We have a First Amendment right to criticize the government. But this freedom does not translate into a right to criticize one’s boss even if, as for millions of Americans, one’s boss happens to be a government employer. Public employee speech doctrine has long established wide latitude for public employers to supervise their workers. Employees must show at the threshold that their speech was on a matter of public concern and not an internal workplace matter. The Supreme Court’s pronouncements over the last decade in a related doctrinal area, however, have unsettled the line demarcating workplace speech. In its agency …

Private Ordering And Improving Information Flow To The Board Of Directors: The Duty To Inform Bylaw, Jennifer O'Hare

Faculty Publications

It seems that almost every day there is another report of a corporate scandal at a public company. Whether the scandal involves sexual harassment by senior management or widespread illegal conduct by employees, the first question asked by investors and the media is usually, “Where was the board?” And the board’s response is almost always, “We didn’t know.” Directors of public companies rely on officers to provide the information the board needs to manage the corporation, but, strangely enough, officers may not even be legally required to provide information to the board. The Delaware General Corporation Law is silent on …

The New Social Contracts In International Supply Chains, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article considers, from legal, practical, moral, and policy perspectives, Model Contract Clauses (MCCs) to protect the human rights of workers in international supply chains. The product of the ABA Business Law Section Working Group to Draft Human Rights Protections in International Supply Contracts, the MCCs are an effort to provide companies with carefully researched and well-drafted clauses to incorporate human rights policies into supply contracts (purchase orders, master vendor agreements, and the like). The Article discusses the impetus, goals, and strategies of the MCCs and explains the paradigm of the corporate, operational, and political landscape for which they are …

Reclaiming The Navajo Range: Resolving The Conflict Between Grazing Rights And Development, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Grazing is fundamental to Navajo identity, yet management of the Navajo range remains highly problematic. This Essay connects the federal government's devastating livestock reduction effort of the 1930s with the inability of the Navajo Nation to place meaningful limits on grazing and the power of grazing permittees. It argues that the Navajo Nation should consider reasserting the tribe's traditional understanding that property rights depend on use as a way to create space for reservation development.

Disrupting The Discrimination Narrative: An Argument For Wage And Hour Laws' Inclusion In Antisubordination Advocacy, Llezlie Green

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The traditional discrimination narrative dominates both legal and popular understanding of workplace exploitation of African American workers. This narrative, however, is incomplete as it fails to consider other chronic workplace challenges such as wage theft. The dominant narrative draws upon an anticlassification framework rather than an antisubordination framework. In addition, post-racial legal analyses complicate the dominant narrative’s utility, particularly in a system plagued by structural inequality. Furthermore, both its legal underpinnings and the normative realities of pursuing discrimination claims challenge its efficacy in addressing workplace subordination. Wage theft has largely characterized only the immigrant worker exploitation narrative, despite wage theft’s …

Wage Theft In Lawless Courts, Llezlie Green

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Low-wage workers experience wage theft — that is, employers’ failure to pay earned wages — at alarmingly high rates. Indeed, the number of wage and hour cases filed in federal and state courts and administrative agencies steadily increases every year. While much of the scholarly assessment of wage and hour litigation focuses on large collective and class actions involving hundreds or thousands of workers and millions of dollars in lost wages, the experiences of individual workers with small claims have received little attention. Furthermore, scholarly consideration of the justice gap in lower courts, more generally, has often focused on debt …

Taxation Of Automation And Artificial Intelligence As A Tool Of Labour Policy, Vincent Ooi, Glendon Goh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Rapid developments in automation technology pose a risk of mass displacement of human labour, resulting in the need to support and retrain displaced workers (a negative externality). We propose an “automation tax” that would slow the adoption of automation technology in appropriate circumstances, giving workers and social support systems time to adapt. This could be easily implemented through changes to the existing schedular system of depreciation/ capital allowances, reducing the uncertainty of its application and implementation costs. Such a system would be flexible enough to keep up with rapid technological developments. Two main dimensions may be adjusted to produce intended …

All Balls And No Strikes: The Roberts Court’S Anti-Worker Activism, J. Maria Glover

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, legislatures and courts have created and preserved rights and remedies for vulnerable groups—consumers, employees, victims of mass torts, investors, and the like. Both branches have extolled the virtues of these substantive rights and the private enforcement mechanisms required to effectuate them. However, despite statements like that of Justice Roberts and others that the judiciary is not a lawmaking body—indeed, that the judicial institution should take care to exercise restraint—the Roberts Court has engaged in sweeping reform that tends to extinguish these substantive rights.

In 2012, I traced how the Roberts Court paid scant attention to the integral role …

Reimagining Trade Agreements For Workers: Lessons From The Usmca, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A backlash against the post-Cold War order of liberal globalization has taken hold in the rich North Atlantic countries. Concerns about wages, working conditions, and economic opportunity are central to the critique of international trade agreements of the last three decades. While labor rights have progressively been included in trade agreements, they have done little to reshape workers’ well-being and workplace conditions. The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) may signal a pivot to a new model requiring reforms of domestic labor law and other issues important to workers. However, there is much more to be done to rebalance the power …

The New Frontier For Labor In Trade Agreements, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the spring of 2015, I took my students of international trade law to visit the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva. It was a two-day trip, organized around lectures and discussions with staff from different divisions of the organization, the Advisory Centre of WTO Law and the permanent missions of two countries. None of my students had been there before, and even though I had taught international trade law for several years, it was also my first time visiting the headquarters of the organization. We were excited and curious. The building looked big and majestic. The back side opened …

The Workers' Constitution, Luke P. Norris

Law Faculty Publications

This Article argues that the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, Social Security Act of 1935, and Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 should be understood as a “workers’ constitution.” The Article tells the history of how a connected wave of social movements responded to the insecurity that wage earners faced after the Industrial Revolution and Great Depression by working with government officials to bring about federal collective bargaining rights, wage and hour legislation, and social security legislation. It argues that the statutes are tied together as a set of “small c” constitutional commitments in both their histories and theory. …

Who Tells Your Story: The Legality Of And Shift In Racial Preferences Within Casting Practices, Nicole Ligon

Faculty Scholarship

Expressing racial preferences in casting calls and hiring practices is nothing new. Producers of television shows, movies, and Broadway musicals have regularly and explicitly sought to hire actors and actresses with certain physical characteristics, including race, in casting their productions. And, given that the industry seemingly accepted this standard when it favored white talent, the public heard little about it. To the extent controversy arose, courts quelled concerns in a swift and easy fashion, without consideration of the societal harms or impacts that stereotyped or limited portrayals of minorities in entertainment could have on the public’s perception of people of …

Introduction To The Symposium On Transnational Futures Of International Labor Law, Adelle Blackett, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

The centenary of the international organization whose constitution proclaims that social justice is indispensable for universal and lasting peace is too pivotal to go unnoticed. Established during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the International Labour Organization (ILO) was once a paradigmatic subject of study by international legal scholars and international relations theorists. A uniquely tripartite institution whose governance structure comprises workers, employers, and governments, the ILO survived the beleaguered League of Nations to become the first United Nations specialized agency in 1946. Its staff narrowly escaped the rise of fascism in Europe and settled into a wartime home at …

The Ilo At 100: Institutional Innovation In An Era Of Populism, Laurence R. Helfer

Faculty Scholarship

The centenary of the International Labor Organization (ILO) provides an opportunity to take stock of the organization’s many achievements. But the centenary also calls for a clear-eyed assessment of the profound challenges that the ILO currently faces – including the growth of the informal and gig economies, digitization and automation, and rising material inequality – and the populist ferment that those trends have helped to engender. This essay, part of a forthcoming AJIL Unbound symposium on "The Transnational Futures of International Labor Law," sketches the ILO’s rich history of legal and policy innovation in response to changes in labor conditions …

Digital Labour Platforms: A Need For International Regulation?, Janine Berg, Miriam A. Cherry, Uma Rani

Faculty Publications

Web-based, digital labour platforms permit the real-time hiring of labour for a myriad of tasks from IT programming to graphic design to routine clerical tasks. The ease, flexibility and low-cost of outsourcing work to digital labour platforms has resulted in their growth, and this growth is likely to continue in the future. Yet these online activities pose important regulatory challenges that cannot effectively be addressed solely through national responses. Recognizing these difficulties, the ILO’s Global Commission on the Future of Work called for an international governance system for digital labour platforms that could set and require platforms, and their clients, …

Job Automation In The 1960s: A Discourse Ahead Of Its Time (And For Our Time), Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

New technologies, such as on-demand platforms, algorithmic management, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, virtual presence, people analytics, and gamification are all beginning to have an impact on the world of work. Many contemporary scholars and policymakers view these trends as provoking an existential clash with the traditional employment relationship, the gateway definition for most labor and employment law. While many portray the concern about technology and the on-demand economy as seemingly brand new issues, these contemporary discussions are fundamentally linked to the past as part of a longstanding dialogue on automation and work.

The concerns raised are cyclical, repetitious, and …

Can God Create A Rock So Heavy That He Cannot Lift It?: Outlawing Pensions Under State Constitutions, Chad J. Pomeroy

Faculty Articles

Public pensions are a problem. More than twenty-seven million people participate in state and local government pension plans. And those plans are in the hole trillions of dollars. This means that state and local governments are going to have to raise additional trillions in taxes (or shift those trillions away from schools, police, firemen, or other spending targets) to satisfy these obligations.

What can be done about such a large, seemingly intractable problem? A number of states have installed specific pension funding requirements within their constitutions. Most state constitutions contain some kind of balanced budget requirement, and a number of …

The Save America's Pastime Act: Special-Interest Legislation Epitomized, Nathaniel Grow

University of Colorado Law Review

Buried deep within the 2,232-page omnibus federal spending bill passed by Congress in March 2018 was an obscure, halfpage provision entitled the "Save America's Pastime Act" (SAPA). The SAPA was inserted into the spending bill at the last minute at the behest of Major League Baseball (MLB) following several years-and several million dollars' worthof lobbying efforts. MLB pursued the legislation to insulate its minor league pay practices from legal challenge after they had become the subject of a federal class action lawsuit alleging that the league's teams failed to pay minor league players in accordance with the Fair Labor Standards …