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 »
Yesterday, President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh currently serves as a judge on the United States Appeals Court for the District of Columbia Circuit. He was nominated to the D.C. ... More »
Some of the hottest questions in labor policy over the past few years have been: how big is the “gig economy” or the “fissured workplace” or the “on-demand sector”? The Bureau of Labor Statistics gave its surprising answer to this question last week: smaller... More »
“[S]peech on public issues occupies the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values, and is entitled to special protection.” Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443, 452 (2011) (citation omitted). Nearly every brief filed in Janus v. AFSCME advocating for t... More »
In September, we worried that the Trump Administration was using Epic Systems (aka Murphy Oil) to lay the groundwork for curtailing protection of concerted activity outside the union organizing and collective bargaining context. To our relief, Epic Systems do... More »