Catherine Fisk is the Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong Professor of Law at UC Berkeley Law, where she teaches and writes on the law of the workplace, legal history, civil rights and the legal profession. She is the author of dozens of articles and four books, including the prize-winning Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of the Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930, and Labor Law in the Contemporary Workplace. Her research focuses on workers at both the high end and the low end of the wage spectrum. She has written on union organizing among low-wage and immigrant workers as well as on labor issues in the entertainment industry, employee mobility in technology sectors, employer-employee disputes over attribution and ownership of intellectual property, the rights of employees and unions to engage in political activity, and labor law reform. She is the co-author, with UCI Law Professor Ann Southworth, of an innovative interdisciplinary casebook, The Legal Profession. Her current public service includes membership on the SEIU Ethics Review Board, the Board of Directors of the Wage Justice Center, and committees of the Law & Society Association. Prior to joining the founding faculty of UC Irvine School of Law, Fisk was a chaired professor at Duke Law School, and was on the faculty of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. She practiced law at a boutique Washington, D.C. firm and at the U.S. Department of Justice. She received her J.D. at UC Berkeley, and an A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University.
I reported on Saturday that at the very moment Donald Trump was at the Capitol delivering his Inaugural Address promising a better life for the working class, a staffer was inside the Department of Labor taking information off the DOL website. The first to go was a report on efforts to promote LGBT inclusion in the workplace. After a furor on social media about the deletion of the report, it was briefly restored to the site, but now it is gone again.
Other things have also disappeared. For example, if one searches “Paid Leave DOL” on Google, or on the DOL site, one gets the following:
But clicking on the link or entering the URL into a browser takes you to the DOL page on the FMLA, which of course provides only unpaid leave. Gone is the page suggesting it’s time to give more Americans paid leave.
If the Trump Administration is serious about paid leave (as they claim), why are they promptly deleting from the DOL site a feature about paid leave?
Daily News & Commentary
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June 27
Labor's role in Zohran Mamdani's victory; DHS funding amendment aims to expand guest worker programs; COSELL submission deadline rapidly approaching
June 26
A district judge issues a preliminary injunction blocking agencies from implementing Trump’s executive order eliminating collective bargaining for federal workers; workers organize for the reinstatement of two doctors who were put on administrative leave after union activity; and Lamont vetoes unemployment benefits for striking workers.
June 25
Some circuits show less deference to NLRB; 3d Cir. affirms return to broader concerted activity definition; changes to federal workforce excluded from One Big Beautiful Bill.
June 24
In today’s news and commentary, the DOL proposes new wage and hour rules, Ford warns of EV battery manufacturing trouble, and California reaches an agreement to delay an in-person work mandate for state employees. The Trump Administration’s Department of Labor has advanced a series of proposals to update federal wage and hour rules. First, the […]
June 23
Supreme Court interprets ADA; Department of Labor effectively kills Biden-era regulation; NYC announces new wages for rideshare drivers.
June 22
California lawmakers challenge Garmon preemption in the absence of an NLRB quorum and Utah organizers successfully secure a ballot referendum to overturn HB 267.