Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

Politics At Work After Citizens United, Ruben J. Garcia

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

There are seismic changes going on in the political system. The United States Supreme Court has constitutionalized the concentration of political power in the “one percent” in several recent decisions, including Citizens United v. FEC. At the same time, unions are representing a shrinking share of the workforce, and their political power is also being diminished. In order for unions to recalibrate the balance of political power at all, they must collaborate with grassroots community groups, as they have done in several recent campaigns. There are, however, various legal structures that make coordination between unions and nonunion groups difficult, …

Creative Capitalism And Human Trafficking: A Business Approach To Eliminate Forced Labor And Human Trafficking From Global Supply Chains, Dana Raigrodski

Articles

A great amount of revenue generated by businesses in the global economy can be linked to the trafficking and enslavement of human beings. Yet, the current discourse on human trafficking fails to recognize the magnitude of benefit consumers, businesses, and economies gain from the work of forced and trafficked labor. Moreover, the limited efforts that seek to address this situation have focused on ways to encourage businesses to voluntarily adopt more socially responsible practices. These measures have had only limited success, and are generally believed to be in tension with the for-profit purposes of businesses.

Hence, the task of convincing …

Reasons For Counseling Reasonableness In Deploying Covenants-Not-To-Compete In Technology Firms, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Some states ban the enforcement of employee covenants-not-to-compete (“non-competes”) but most enforce them to the extent they are reasonable. As such, “reasonableness” provides the touchstone for enforceability analysis. The academic literature commenting on the reasonableness of non-competes is large and growing. Scholars usually direct their comments to judges, legislators, and other scholars.

Rarely do they address practicing lawyers. That omission is particularly unfortunate because practicing lawyers, more than judges, legislators, and scholars, can affect whether non-competes work both fairly and effectively. This Article fills that void by providing reasons, directed to practicing lawyers, for deploying non-competes in a reasonable manner. …

Union Representation In Employment Arbitration, Ann C. Hodges

Law Faculty Publications

Employers in recent years have promulgated arbitration programs to resolve disputes with their present and former employees. Arbitration may in many cases provide a lower-cost forum than litigation for resolving such disputes. But the problem of representation of Americans of modest incomes still remains. Ann Hodges explores in this chapter whether labor unions can help address that representation gap.

The New Labor Law, Kate Andrias

Faculty Scholarship

Labor law is failing. Disfigured by courts, attacked by employers, and rendered inapt by a global and fissured economy, many of labor law’s most ardent proponents have abandoned it altogether. And for good reason: the law that governs collective organization and bargaining among workers has little to offer those it purports to protect. Several scholars have suggested ways to breathe new life into the old regime, yet their proposals do not solve the basic problem. Labor law developed for the New Deal does not provide solutions to today’s inequities. But all hope is not lost. From the remnants of the …

Overcoming The Great Forgetting: A Comment On Fishkin And Forbath, Jedediah S. Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

Fishkin and Forbath’s (F&F’s) manuscript is a project of recovery. It portrays the present as a time marked by a “Great Forgetting” of a tradition of constitutional political economy. F&F name what has been forgotten the “democracy of opportunity” tradition. Recovering it would mean again treating the following three principles as linked elements at the core of our Constitution: (1) an anti-oligarchy principle that works to prevent wealth from producing grossly unequal political power; (2) a commitment to a broad middle class with secure, respected work; and (3) a principle of inclusion that opens participation in both citizenship and the …

Special Treatment Stigma After The Ada Amendments Act, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Faculty Publications

This Article explores a unique source of stigma suffered by individuals with disabilities in the workplace. Instead of focusing on those with the most stigmatizing disabilities, I focus on those individuals who have disabilities that are not perceived as very severe, yet they still suffer stigma. These individuals are stigmatized because of the special treatment they receive (or are perceived as receiving) through workplace accommodations provided pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In prior work, I have called this phenomenon "special treatment stigma, " the harm that arises from receiving special treatment in the workplace, especially when coworkers …

Deficiencies In The Agricultural Labor Market, Rafael Rodriguez

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Too Much Information!: The Need For Stronger Privacy Protection For The Online Activities Of Employees And Applicants, Ralph Carter

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

No abstract provided.

A Genesis Of Conflict: The Zero-Sum Mindset, Jonathan R. Cohen

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

Parties in conflict often operate under the assumption that for one party to win, the other party must lose. This concept, known as the "zero-sum mindset, " can lead to undesirable results, both because it can make disputes harder to resolve and because people holding such beliefs are more likely to get into conflicts to begin with. Over the past several decades, legal educators specializing in dispute resolution have worked hard to challenge that mindset. This task is not simple, for framing conflict in zero-sum terms has very deep cultural roots tracing back at least to the Biblical stories in …

Saving Mr. Banks And Other Interest-Based Negotiations, Michael Rogers

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

The goal of this article is to encourage the use of interestbased negotiations. Some of the stories included will be familiar; others will be fresh. In Getting to Yes, Fisher and Ury identify four principles of negotiation ("principled negotiation") that can be employed effectively in almost any type of dispute resolution: (1) Separate the people from the problem; (2) Focus on interests rather than positions; (3) Invent options for mutual gain; and (4) Insist on using objective criteria. Because focusing on interests is the second step identified in Getting to Yes, and inventing options for mutual gain is the …

A Law Of Just Transitions?: Putting Labor Law To Work On Climate Change, David J. Doorey

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

Climate change will dramatically affect labor markets, but labor law scholars have mostly ignored it. Environmental law scholars are concerned with climate change, but they lack expertise in the complexities of regulating the labor relationship. Neither legal field is equipped to deal adequately with the challenge of governing the effects of climate change on labor markets, employers, and workers. This essay argues that a legal field organized around the concept of a 'just transition' to a lower carbon economy could bring together environmental law, labor law, and environment justice scholars in interesting and valuable ways. "Just transitions" is a concept …

Inequality, Discrimination And Sexual Violence In Us Collegiate Sports, Erin E. Buzuvis, Kristine Newhall

Faculty Scholarship

While college athletics attract thousands of participants and millions of fans each year, examination of United States college athletics reveals a pattern of inequality, discrimination and abuse, which operates to foreclose women's access and suppress women's interest in athletic participation and leadership. This Chapter examines three gender related issues of integrity in college athletics: gender discrimination in athletic participation and opportunity; barriers to leadership for women coaches and administrators; and the relationship between athletics and sexual violence at college and universities. The Chapter also identifies a number of remedies that can mitigate these problems involving the Department of Education, Congress, …

Disability Rights And Labor: Is This Conflict Really Necessary?, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Indiana Law Journal

In this Essay, I hope to do two things: First, I try to put the current labor-disability controversy into that broader context. Second, and perhaps more important, I take a position on how disability rights advocates should approach both the current contro-versy and labor-disability tensions more broadly. As to the narrow dispute over wage-and-hour protections for personal-assistance workers, I argue both that those workers have a compelling normative claim to full FLSA protection—a claim that disability rights advocates should recognize—and that supporting the claim of those workers is pragmatically in the best interests of the disability rights movement. As to …

Modifying At-Will Employment Contracts, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

Long-term employment relationships are constantly in flux: terms of compensation, company policies, and a variety of other conditions of work are routinely altered over the course of an employee’s job. In cases involving at-will employment, the economic realities and power dynamics are such that changes in terms are likely to be introduced unilaterally by the employer, often without advance notice. To date, however, neither courts nor commentators have holistically considered this problem of “midterm modifications” - contractual documents imposed post-hire on implicit or explicit threat of termination. Bringing together the law of noncompetes, arbitration agreements, and employee handbooks, this Article …

Scaling Carnegie: Four Iterations Of Teaching Transactional Workplace Law Skills, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

The post-Recession demand for increased skills education in law school has spawned rich experimentation in course development and pedagogy. Less progress has been made, however, in developing holistic and sustainable curricula. Among the many challenges is the high per-student cost of delivering hands-on skills-oriented learning. The success of many law school initiatives to improve practice-readiness will depend in large part on the viability of merging skills education into the traditional large-class format. This published presentation, delivered at the Emory Law School Center for Transactional Law & Practice, examines four models of teaching transactional workplace law skills, based on the author’s …

Statehood, Power, And The New Face Of Consent, Sheldon Leader

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Individuals and groups are often subjected to power, both public and private, by eliciting their consent. Debate usually focuses on whether or not that consent is freely given or is vitiated by imbalances of strength between the bargaining parties. This essay focuses on a different issue, one that is largely passed over in legal and moral analyses: how far does and should consent bind one to accepting in advance changes in the future? There are signs of a fundamental shift in answering this question-a shift that particularly concerns the control of power in the economy. Industrial democracies may be abandoning …

College Football Coaches’ Pay And Contracts: Are They Overpaid And Unfairly Treated?􀀃, Randall Thomas, Lawrence Van Horn

Indiana Law Journal

College football coaches’ employment contracts and compensation garner public attention and scrutiny in much the same way as those of corporate CEOs. In both cases, the public perception is that they must be overpaid and pampered. Economic theory claims that for coaches and CEOs to be overpaid, they must be receiving compensation in excess of the value they create for their organizations. However, both receive pay-for-performance compensation, which structurally aligns their compensation with value creation. This means we need to examine the underlying structure of the contract that gives rise to the observed compensation to determine whether they are appropriately …

Rethinking Employment Discrimination Harms, Jessica Roberts

Indiana Law Journal

Establishing harm is essential to many legal claims. This Article urges the law to adopt a more expansive notion of the harms of employment discrimination to better reflect the cognitive functions of individuals who face discrimination. While the effect of implicit bias on the mental state of potential discriminators is well-worn territory in antidiscrimination scholarship, little has been written about a sister theory: stereotype threat. More than a decade’s worth of social psychology research indicates that when a person is conscious of her membership in a particular group and the group is the subject of a widely recognized stereotype, that …

The Behavioral Economic Case For Paternalistic Workplace Retirement Plans, Paul M. Secunda

Indiana Law Journal

Dependence on 401(k) retirement accounts continues to cause a massive retirement crisis in the United States by leaving most workers unprepared for retirement. The voluntary, inaccessible, employer-centered, expensive, and consumer-driven natures of these plans have combined to make retirement a type of corporate-inspired elder abuse in America.

Behavioral economics considers the utility of permitting individual choice in decision-making settings. Many, however, have been misled to believe that greater choice is always better. Yet, according to one prominent commentator, this consumer-driven paradigm will lead to 48% of current workers between the ages of fifty and sixty-four being poor when they reach …