Labor and Employment Law Commons^™

“I Do Not Feel I Am A Piece Of Property To Be Bought And Sold Irrespective Of My Wishes:” Athlete Activism And The Sociocultural Impact Of Curt Flood’S Lawsuit Against Major League Baseball, Luka Green

Pomona Senior Theses

In January 1970, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood filed a suit against MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, protesting the Reserve Clause in Major League Baseball that did not allow players the right to negotiate contract terms with any team but their current one. In doing so, he cemented his status as a divisive figure in baseball, the media, and with the general public. One of the primary reasons for such an extreme reaction was Flood’s rhetoric surrounding the case, as he repeatedly invoked slavery and other forms of peonage when describing the working conditions of professional baseball players. This sparked …

How Well-Targeted Are Payroll Tax Cuts As A Response To Covid-19? Evidence From China, Wei Cui, Jeffrey Hicks, Max Norton

All Faculty Publications

Numerous countries cut payroll taxes in response to economic downturns caused by COVID-19. This includes China, which completely exempted most firms from making social insurance (SI) contributions, resulting in an average tax cut of 21 percentage points on formal labor costs and approximately 20% of total tax remittances made by firms. We use novel data on 900,000 firms in one Chinese province to document new facts about the structure of SI in China and evaluate payroll tax cuts as a COVID-19 relief measure. We calculate that labor informality causes 54% of tax-registered firms---representing 24% of aggregate economic activity---to receive no …

Encouraging Healing For Home Health Aides.Pdf, Joann Sahl

Akron Law Faculty Publications

The United States faces a national crisis to provide adequate carefor its aging population. A critical component of this crisis is thenation’s inability to provide enough home health care aides to assistwith important, if not vital, long-term care needs.This Article identifies a labor pool to help resolve this crisis: quali-fied workers with criminal convictions. But home health care aideswith criminal convictions face an inhospitable landscape. Employersin the health care field are risk-averse to hiring these workers.Furthermore, most states’ laws impose permanent employment banson home health aides with criminal convictions.The Article examines the warren of laws used to disqualify homehealth care …

Children, Chocolate, And Profits: A Policy-Oriented Analysis Of Child Labor And The Chocolate Industry Giants, Ann W. Deam

Intercultural Human Rights Law Review

In 2001, the chocolate industry adopted the Harkin-Engel Protocol, also referred to as the Chocolate Industry Protocol, in which it "publicly acknowledged the problem of forced child labor" with a promise to "commit significant resources to address it" and ensure that "cocoa beans and their derivative products have been grown and/or processed without any of the worst forms of child labor." The noble goals set forth in this voluntary, self-regulating agreement were to be attained by 2005. Twenty years have passed since the signing of the Chocolate Industry Protocol (CIP). The purpose of this paper is to determine the effectiveness …

A Rules-Based Approach To Jam’S Restrictive Immunity: Implications For International Organizations, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

U.S. jurisprudence has granted international organizations immunity from suit, even when they carry out operations that violate U.S. rules. In the recent Jam v. Int’l Fin. Corp., the Supreme Court reversed this jurisprudence and restricted the immunity of international organizations. Jam is a landmark decision, but the Court’s failure to address critical questions concerning the scope and meaning of its restricted immunity has led to legal uncertainty and criticism. Under both predominant theories in the international organization discourse – functionalism and constitutionalism – scholars predict that Jam will have a deleterious impact on international organizations. Given the theories’ emphasis on …

The Complexities Of Democracy, Development, And Human Rights In China's Belt And Road Initiative, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)-a dense network of China-funded multi-year infrastructure projects in over 65 countries from the Western Pacific to the Baltic Sea, collectively aiming to establish China's strategic "Maritime Belt" and "Silk Road" connectivity using an estimated range of USD$1 Trillion to USD$8 Trillion--is as unprecedented phenomenon in sovereign project financing and bilateral investment lending, since the United States' grant of USD $800 Billion for the Marshall Plan was for Europe's post World War II reconstruction. The scale, scope, and terms of BRI projects remain shrouded in relative opacity, with China as of this writing only incrementally …

Humans Vs. Robots: Rethinking Tax Policy For A More Sustainable Future, Kathryn Kisska-Schulze, Karie Davis-Nozemack

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Manipulating Opportunity, Pauline Kim

Scholarship@WashULaw

Concerns about online manipulation have centered on fears about undermining the autonomy of consumers and citizens. What has been overlooked is the risk that the same techniques of personalizing information online can also threaten equality. When predictive algorithms are used to allocate information about opportunities like employment, housing, and credit, they can reproduce past patterns of discrimination and exclusion in these markets. This Article explores these issues by focusing on the labor market, which is increasingly dominated by tech intermediaries. These platforms rely on predictive algorithms to distribute information about job openings, match job seekers with hiring firms, or recruit …

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …

Why Protect Unauthorized Workers? Imperfect Proxies, Unaccountable Employers, And Antidiscrimination Law's Failures, Angela D. Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

This article explores a gap in the scholarship regarding the unauthorized workplace. It describes and names the two main justifications on which advocates and courts have relied to extend federal antidiscrimination protections to unauthorized workers. First, the proxy justification insists that workplace protections must include unauthorized workers because their protection is necessary to protect U.S. citizen and authorized workers. Second, the deterrence/accountability justification states that workplace protections must include unauthorized workers because it will deter employers from future violations of antidiscrimination laws and hold them accountable for violations of immigration law. While these justifications have led to some protection for …

Dehumanization “Because Of Sex”: The Multiaxial Approach To The Title Vii Rights Of Sexual Minorities, Shirley Lin

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Not So Friendly Skies: Pilots’ Attempt To Claim Employer Collusion With Rival Pilots Union During Collective Bargaining Fails In Beckington, Drew Baker

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

No abstract provided.

A Global System Of Work, A Global System Of Regulation?: Crowdwork And Conflicts Of Law, Miriam A. Cherry

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The on-demand economy has truly gone global. Consider online platform TaskRabbit, a U.S.-based site for odd jobs. A high number of TaskRabbit’s users were seeking help with the construction of furniture they purchased at IKEA, and skilled carpenters started using the platform to find customers. Corporate management at Swedish company IKEA noticed the trend, and as a result acquired TaskRabbit in 2017. As a result, a Swedish company now owns a platform labor service in the United States and Britain, with plans to expand the TaskRabbit platform to twenty-seven more countries where IKEA currently owns brick and mortar stores. …

Gig Workers As Essential Workers: How To Correct The Gig Economy Beyond The Covid-19 Pandemic, Miriam A. Cherry, Ana Santos Rutschman

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, estimates suggest that approximately forty percent of U.S. workers shifted to working remotely from home. But for many gig workers, who performed grocery shopping for Instacart, delivered food and restaurant meals for DoorDash, or who picked up and delivered packages for Shipt, they were working in person and busier than ever. In fact, many of these gig jobs were considered "essential work," and the rules of state lockdowns across the country classified gig workers as "essential workers."

Paid by the task, and managed by algorithms that can automatically deactivate …

Discrimination, The Speech That Enables It, And The First Amendment, Helen Norton

Publications

Imagine that you’re interviewing for your dream job, only to be asked by the hiring committee whether you’re pregnant. Or HIV positive. Or Muslim. Does the First Amendment protect your interviewers’ inquiries from government regulation? This Article explores that question.

Antidiscrimination laws forbid employers, housing providers, insurers, lenders, and other gatekeepers from relying on certain characteristics in their decision-making. Many of these laws also regulate those actors’ speech by prohibiting them from inquiring about applicants’ protected class characteristics; these provisions seek to stop illegal discrimination before it occurs by preventing gatekeepers from eliciting information that would enable them to discriminate. …

All The World’S A Platform?: Some Remarks On 'Marketplace Platform' Employment Laws, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper addresses the enactment of marketplace platform laws, which have arisen as a remarkable feature of the "gig" economy in recent years. A marketplace platform law decides the question of whether an individual worker is an independent contractor or an employee — an ongoing controversy in all employment law, including workers’ compensation law — by emphasizing factors other than those normally considered in traditional legal analyses. As of this writing, seven states appear to have enacted marketplace platform laws.

In short, marketplace platform laws — developed substantially and lobbied aggressively by the company Handy, Inc. — make it much …

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd) Coverage And Other Expanding Benefit Changes In The Workers’ Compensation Insurance Marketplace: Academic Legal Perspective, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses the increased use of causation presumptions in workers' compensation cases involving firefighters and other first responders. It also considers increasing workers' compensation coverage of post traumatic stress disorder with respect to those same categories of workers. The paper discusses how workers' compensation coverage of certain conditions tends to parallel the growth of potential tort liability, observes that disease presumptions were a feature of early 20th century workers' compensation statutes (and so are not new), and argues that recognition of workers' compensation "mental-mental" claims has been consistent with "zone of danger" expansion of the negligent infliction of emotional …

The New "Essential": Rethinking Social Goods In The Age Of Covid-19, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

The Covid-19 crisis has laid bare the fragility of social insurance systems in the United States and the lack of income security and basic benefits for many workers and residents. The United States has long had weaker protections for workers compared to other liberal democracies racial and economic disparities among those most affected by these dislocations (analyses are hampered by a paucity of demographic data). Those who were socially and economically vulnerable before the pandemic (for example due to homelessness, immigration status, or incarceration) are likely to suffer the most harm. Changes in workplace conditions as a result of the …

What's Wrong With Police Unions?, Benjamin Levin

Publications

In an era of declining labor power, police unions stand as a rare success story for worker organizing—they exert political clout and negotiate favorable terms for their members. Yet, despite broad support for unionization on the political left, police unions have become public enemy number one for academics and activists concerned about race and police violence. Much criticism of police unions focuses on their obstructionist nature and how they prioritize the interests of their members over the interests of the communities they police. These critiques are compelling—police unions shield officers and block oversight. But, taken seriously, they often sound like …

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] …