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Author:Vail Kohnert-Yount

Vail Kohnert-Yount is a student at Harvard Law School.

Paid Leave in the Time of Coronavirus: Lessons from Texas

Mar 20, 2020 Vail Kohnert-Yount

On Wednesday, Congress passed the first widespread federal paid sick leave mandate within its coronavirus emergency relief package. Only a massive pandemic—current estimates predict, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States—could convince Congress to enact even a temporary paid sick leave measure. Since 2011, states and cities have acted on […]

January 22, 2020
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

In an effort to reach young people interested in careers in security, policing, or the military, the U.S. Border Patrol continues to offer a program for 14-to-20-year-olds called Border Patrol Explorers that has been in existence since 1984. For $25 plus the cost of some uniform items, young people—many of them the children of immigrants—learn […]

January 17, 2020
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Working-class candidates are making personal and financial sacrifices to run for office, despite campaign guidelines specifically intended to make it easier for them to quit their jobs and run. A 2002 Federal Election Commission rule permits candidates running in a general election to pay themselves salaries from their campaign contributions at a per-diem rate equal […]

January 14, 2020
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Instacart workers are asking customers of the grocery delivery app to participate in a two-day nationwide boycott next week. Organizers of the boycott have one demand: that the company restores its default tip amount to 10%. Thousands of workers staged a three-day national strike in November, demanding the app restore the 10% default tip, which […]

December 16, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Last week, Washington’s Governor Jay Inslee took executive action via the state Labor Department to enact the country’s most comprehensive set of overtime regulations for workers, which will restore overtime protections for nearly 420,000 middle-class workers in the state. Over the last 40 years, employers have been gradually taking overtime pay away from more and […]

December 3, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Harvard graduate student workers are going on strike today, after university administrators ended a bargaining session with the Harvard Graduate Student Union-UAW yesterday without reaching agreement on a contract. (Full disclosure: Many of OnLabor‘s contributors are HGSU-UAW members.) Bernie Sanders expressed his support for striking student workers, and OnLabor‘s own Annie Hollister published an op-ed in […]

November 19, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine announced today that his office is suing food delivery service DoorDash for deceiving consumers by taking tips from food delivery workers. “DoorDash misled consumers, who reasonably believed that their tips would go to workers, not the company’s bottom line,” said Racine. Five months after the office began its investigation, […]

November 8, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a historic civil rights organization headquartered in Montgomery, Alabama, are forming a union. Yesterday, the News Guild, an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America, delivered a letter to the organization requesting card check recognition, and a supermajority of staff from SPLC’s 11 offices across five states in […]

November 5, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

After McDonald’s fired its CEO Steve Easterbrook for a relationship with an employee that violated corporate policy, its top human resources officer, David Fairhurst, has also departed as the fast-food giant faces renewed scrutiny of its record on sexual harassment in its workplaces. It’s unclear if Fairhurst’s departure is related to Easterbrook’s, who received severance […]

November 1, 2019
News & Commentary

Vail Kohnert-Yount

Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash have unveiled their ballot initiative to undo the worker protections in California’s recently passed AB5 law. While these gig economy giants claim that drivers will receive guaranteed pay equal to 120% of the minimum wage, a study released yesterday by the UC Berkeley Labor Center came to a very different conclusion. […]

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OnLabor

Law. Workers. Organizing.

OnLabor is a blog devoted to workers, unions, and their politics. We interpret our subject broadly to include the current crisis in the traditional union movement (why union decline is happening and what it means for our society); the new and contested forms of worker organization that are filling the labor union gap; how work ought to be structured and managed; how workers ought to be represented and compensated; and the appropriate role of government — all three branches — in each of these issues.

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Paid Leave in the Time of Coronavirus: Lessons from Texas

January 22, 2020

January 17, 2020

January 14, 2020

December 16, 2019

December 3, 2019

November 19, 2019

November 8, 2019

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November 1, 2019