In today’s News and Commentary, the Third Circuit shuts down a driver’s age discrimination and retaliation suit against CBS and the Teamsters, employment-related litigation is surging in Washington state, and a new book from MIT Sloan argues that the growth of contingent work is remaking the American labor market.

The Third Circuit declined on Monday to reinstate a Pennsylvania truck driver’s suit alleging that CBS Studios and TriStar Pictures refused to hire him because of his age and that his local Teamsters blacklisted him for complaining about its hiring practices. Timothy McLaughlin, a movie set driver, claimed he was shut out of film production work in favor of younger, less experienced drivers with personal connections to union officials, and that Teamsters Local 249 retaliated against him for criticizing its “Producer’s Choice” referral system and filing charges with the NLRB and EEOC. Writing for the panel, Judge Theodore McKee held that McLaughlin’s claims failed because the union did not make hiring decisions—the referral application itself stated in bold, capitalized text that the local had no responsibility for producers’ hiring choices. The court also found that McLaughlin could not establish the causal connection required under the McDonnell Douglas burden-shifting framework between his protected activity and the producers’ failure to hire him.

Employment-related litigation is surging in Washington state, with at least 258 labor and employment suits filed in state and federal court in July alone. The trend has accelerated sharply, up from 155 suits in May and 216 in June. Among the cases driving the spike are a growing number of challenges to employer anti-moonlighting policies—workplace rules that prohibit employees from holding a second job—alongside more traditional claims involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wage-and-hour violations. 

A new book by MIT Sloan emeritus professor Paul Osterman argues that American employers are increasingly abandoning long-term employment relationships in favor of what he calls “disposable workers.” These include contractors, freelancers, gig workers, and a category he introduces as “marginal employees,” who are technically on payroll but disconnected from career pathways and treated as interchangeable. Drawing on a nationally representative survey of more than 6,000 workers and nearly 100 interviews, Osterman finds that disposable work already constitutes a large share of the labor market and predicts it will grow. Standard employment, he argues, functions as what legal scholar Cynthia Estlund has called a “fortress of rights and benefits”—tax withholding, health insurance, unemployment insurance, anti-discrimination protections, and access to internal career systems. Disposable workers are locked out of that fortress. Osterman acknowledges that some workers prefer the flexibility of contingent arrangements, but he argues that employers are the primary drivers of the shift, motivated by cost reduction and a desire to avoid the rigidities of managing a permanent workforce.