As OnLabor covered last week (here and here), the Department of Labor recently issued an “opinion letter” finding that the workers deriving income from an unnamed “virtual marketplace company” are independent contractors and not employees covered by the Fair L... More »
Earlier this month, the National Labor Relations Board announced that it again would wade into the murky waters of whether charter schools are employers under the National Labor Relations Act. The question that the Board has put before itself this time, howev... More »
Yesterday, Ben and Adrienne sounded a note of caution about the Supreme Court’s opinion in New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, which in many ways constitutes a rare win for workers at the Court. They found a potential long-term problem for Title VII in the origi... More »
This week, United Teachers Los Angeles called their first strike in decades. While the parties are negotiating over wages and staffing, a central issue in the dispute is the much bigger question of underfunding of the public school system. Teachers are askin... More »
Last spring, we promised to share information about the project we’ve launched at Harvard Law School, “Rebalancing Economic and Political Power: A Clean Slate for the Future of Labor Law Reform.” On Labor Day, we laid out our vision for this ambitious project... More »
The picture for robust protection of workers’ rights at the federal level is not a pretty one these days. In the Obama Administration, there were three basic components to our strategy to advance worker protections: (1) promulgate regulations that keep worker... More »
Last week, the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School hosted an event with the National Education Association on the teacher walkouts that spread through red states from January to May 2018. We held this event to learn as much as possible about what... More »
Today, the National Labor Relations Board issued a proposed rule to change its joint employer standard. The proposed rule is the latest step in the Trump Board’s tortuous path to achieving its goal of replacing the Obama Board’s Browning Ferris Industries dec... More »
As divided as we have become as a country, we arrive at this Labor Day with a shared national understanding: both economic and political power are wildly out of balance, with dire consequences for the vast majority of Americans who find themselves on the losin... More »
If you can define success as preventing something bad from happening, the labor movement notched a victory Saturday morning for public sector collective bargaining rights. D.C. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a strongly worded opinion, inval... More »
The New York Times editorial last week celebrating the landslide victory of the ballot initiative to repeal Missouri’s right-to-work (for less) law was entitled, “The Wind at Labor’s Back.” Those words haven’t been put together in that order in a long time, a... More »
This piece was originally published by the Biden Forum. There is no doubt that workers’ bargaining power is on the decline. Workers aren’t seeing the increase in wages that they’ve been waiting for since the end of the Great Recession. Notwithstanding historic... More »